ABSTRACT

Part positioning is an important task in manufactur­ ing. New approaches have been proposed to perform this task using force fields implemented on an active surface. A part placed on such a surface is subjected to a resultant force and torque and moves toward a stable equilibrium configuration. Such force fields can be im­ plemented using different technologies. In this paper, we study the combination of a unit radial field with a small constant force field. In prior work we proved that such a combination can uniquely position a class of non-symmetric parts. In this paper, we propose a more complete modeling of this combination which allows us to devise a method to determine all the equilibrium con­ figurations of a part in the above force fields. This method works for both symmetric and non-symmetric parts. Beyond the method, this paper reports a com­ prehensive study of the action of radial and constant potential fields over parts with an onginal characteri­ zation of local minima of the lifted potential field.