Assembly is an important link in the product life cycle. The assembly of a product directly affects its development time, cost and maintenance cost. It is one of the important performance indicators of a product, and more and more attention is paid by product developers. With the development of modern design concepts such as concurrent engineering and DFX and supporting technologies such as virtual reality technology and CAD technology, virtual assembly technology, which focuses on product assembly, is more and more widely used in product development. Assembly simulation is the basis of virtual assembly technology. It can evaluate the assembly ability of products in the stage of product design and assist assembly process planning.
Assembly simulation includes assembly object modeling, assembly process planning and assembly process simulation. Assembly object determines assembly process, and assembly process is the basis of assembly process simulation With the different properties of assembly objects, the processing methods of the above contents are different According to the deformation of the assembly unit in the assembly process, the assembly unit can be divided into two categories - "rigid components" with relatively fixed shape and "flexible cables" with easy deformation. Accordingly, the assembly object can also be divided into two categories - "multi rigid body system" (only composed of "rigid components") and "rigid flexible hybrid system" (including "rigid components and" flexible cables "). [3]
For the assembly simulation of "multi rigid body system", the corresponding assembly object modeling, assembly process planning and assembly process simulation methods have been relatively mature. However, for the "rigid flexible hybrid system", the corresponding research work is few, and mainly focuses on two aspects: the first aspect is the cable routing method aiming at the research of cable modeling; The second aspect is the cable simulation method aiming at simulating cable deformation. How to plan the assembly process of "rigid flexible hybrid system" from the system level based on the research results of cable routing and cable simulation, and finally form a complete assembly simulation solution of "rigid flexible hybrid system" is an urgent problem to be solved in product assembly simulation. Since most products are "rigid flexible hybrid system" containing both "rigid components" and "flexible cables", the assembly simulation method has great practical value in engineering. Based on the research on cable routing, a complete set of assembly simulation method of "rigid flexible hybrid system" is realized from the perspective of engineering application.
