We present algorithms and results for a robotic manipulation system that was designed to be easily programmable and adaptable to various tasks common to industrial setting, which is inspired by the Industrial Assembly Challenge at the 2018 World Robotics Summit in Tokyo. This challenge included assembly of standard, commercially available industrial parts into 2D and 3D assemblies. We demonstrate three tasks that can be classified into "peg-in-hole" and "hole-on-peg" tasks and identify two canonical algorithms: spiral-based search and tilting insertion. Both algorithms use hand-coded thresholds in the force and torque domains to detect critical points in the assembly. After briefly summarizing the state of the art in research, we describe the strategy and approach utilized by the tested system, how it's design bears on its performance, statistics on 20 experimental trials for each task, lessons learned during the development of the system, and open research challenges that still remain.

The sequence in which a complex product is assembled directly impacts the ease and efficiency of the assembly process, whether executed by a human or a robot. A sequence that gives the assembler the greatest freedom of movement is therefore desirable. Our main contribution is an expression of obstruction relationships between parts as a disassembly interference graph (DIG). We validate this heuristic by developing a disassembly sequence planner that partitions assemblies in a way that prioritizes access to parts, resulting in plans that are comparable in efficiency to two state-of-the-art assembly methods in terms of total plan length. Using DIG, our method generates successive subassembly decompositions, yielding a tree structure that makes parallization opportunities apparent. Our planner generates viable disassembly plans by minimizing our part blockage measure, and thereby demonstrates that this measure is a valuable addition to the Assembly Sequence Planning toolkit.

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