How AutoAssembler Accelerates Product Development

In the fast-paced world of engineering and manufacturing, engineering hours are often your most constrained resource. As a lead engineer for new product development and automation projects, I've seen how assembly issues discovered on the shop floor can consume precious engineering time through costly redesigns. Every day that valuable engineers spend sidelined by redesign work is a significant opportunity cost for the company.

At C-Infinity, we're developing AutoAssembler with clear value propositions for both design and manufacturing engineers:

• For design engineers: Save time by improving Design for Assembly (DFA) checks through automated analysis of CAD geometry for accessibility, tool clearance, stability, and assembly sequence problems, helping validate designs early and avoid costly late-stage rework. Speed up generation of interactive work instructions and assembly planning to avoid pilot build surprises and minimize production delays. Communicate faster and better during reviews.

• For manufacturing engineers: Evaluate multiple 'what-if' planning scenarios, map the designer's intent to the manufacturing floor. Edit plans, re-plan quickly, and customize builds to production facility requirements. AutoAssembler can be deployed on your private networks and tuned to get you the plans you expect to see. Speed up the transition from CAD models released to assembly plans completed.

This results in a clear enterprise value proposition: fewer Engineering Change Notices (ECNs), better configuration management across product variants, and higher operational efficiency. In this blog post I'll dive deeper into how AutoAssembler benefits the product development process from the perspective of the design engineer.

1. Spotting Design Issues Early

Traditional CAD tools often identify interferences only in the final assembled state, leaving the design and manufacturing engineers without a capable DFA tool to validate their CAD geometry. This leaves critical assembly issues undetected until physical prototyping or even production builds discover challenging or impossible assembly steps.

AutoAssembler provides engineers with a powerful tool to validate their CAD geometry for DFA by simulating assembly sequences during the design phase. If a bolt is not accessible due to geometric constraints during the build sequence, AutoAssembler will identify the DFA issue and allow the engineer to adjust the design or build plan to make the bolt accessible.

Through intelligent analysis of CAD assemblies, AutoAssembler identifies potential issues such as:

• Accessibility conflicts: Parts that cannot be reached or manipulated during assembly.
• Assembly sequence violations: Part geometry that creates sequential installation dependencies that cannot be resolved, for example a cover being installed on a feeder assembly line prevents internal parts from being installed.
• Assembly interference detection: Parts that cannot be assembled without conflicting with other parts during the assembly process.
• Assembly stability detection: Parts that cannot be assembled without causing the assembly to be unstable: indicating the need for fixturing.

2. Reduce Planning Time: From Weeks to Hours

Assembly planning traditionally requires experienced engineers to manually analyze CAD models, understand part relationships, and develop logical assembly sequences. AutoAssembler gives design engineers insight into manufacturing constraints while providing manufacturing engineers a head start on planning. The streamlined collaboration between design and manufacturing teams enables quick iteration on assembly approaches, accelerating the overall planning process.

AutoAssembler automates the planning process by reasoning about geometric relationships, assembly paths, and physical constraints to generate intelligent build plans grounded in reality by your CAD geometry that include:

• High quality assembly sequences: Step-by-step animated instructions that account for spatial constraints and handling characteristics of parts and subassemblies.
• Sub-assembly identification: Logical subassembly groupings that can be assembled in parallel to reduce assembly line complexity and minimize part handling.
• Interactive 3D animations: Assembly animations for every step of the assembly process in a 3D viewer that reduces the ambiguity of typical static screenshots.
• Alternative scenarios: Engineers can explore multiple build scenarios to accommodate different production constraints or assembly line strategies.

What previously took engineering teams weeks of effort now happens in a few hours. This dramatic reduction in planning time enables faster design iterations, improved communication between team members, and more agile development cycles. Engineering teams can now spend their valuable time on innovation rather than manual planning tasks.

The time savings compound throughout the development process. When design changes inevitably occur, AutoAssembler can regenerate updated assembly plans and identify any new DFA issues, keeping your production planning in sync with the latest design revisions.

3. Interactive Work Instructions: Clear Communication for Manufacturing

Work instructions can become a source of confusion rather than guidance if they aren't kept up to date with the actual build process or have insufficient detail. If they aren't useful, it can leave manufacturing teams to figure things out on their own without engineering knowing about issues. This can create quality issues, and wasted time spent working around insufficient instructions.

AutoAssembler generates interactive work instructions directly from the latest CAD models without additional engineering effort. The instructions include:

• Visual step-by-step guides: 3D interactive visualizations showing each assembly operation with a line indicating the assembly direction.
• Subassembly instructions: The system will automatically identify subassemblies and break them down into separate instruction sets to improve readability.
• Shareability: A shareable link to the instructions that can be sent to the manufacturing and engineering teams. Shared plans can be editable or read-only.

The visual nature of AutoAssembler's work instructions is particularly powerful. Production teams can see exactly how parts fit together, understand spatial relationships, and quickly grasp the subassembly breakdown structure. This visual clarity reduces assembly errors, improves first-time quality, and improves the feedback loop between engineering and manufacturing. If a technician finds a problem with the instructions, they can easily report it to engineering with a link to the problem.

The Compound Effect: Transforming Development Velocity

The compounding effect of AutoAssembler is not just in addressing individual bottlenecks, but in improving the overall development velocity without increasing risks while also improving first-time quality. When your team can spot design issues early, plan assemblies in hours instead of weeks, and generate work instructions automatically, the entire product development process accelerates.

In today's competitive landscape, the ability to move from concept to production faster than your competitors is a critical advantage. AutoAssembler provides engineering teams with the tools they need to achieve this speed without sacrificing quality or increasing risk.

Looking Forward: The Future of Assembly Intelligence

At C-Infinity, we believe the future is where humans and AI collaborate to create a new form of engineering intelligence. AutoAssembler is just the beginning of this transformation, where AI augments human expertise to solve complex engineering challenges and drive innovation in product development.