Assembly of an object having a stacked construction of a plurality of components

Abstract

There is provided an apparatus for assembling an object having a stacked construction of a plurality of components. The apparatus comprises: a component holder for selectively holding and placing a component; an assembly zone in which the object may be assembled; first and second imaging devices, the first imaging device positioned to face in an upward direction, the second imaging device positioned to face in a downward direction; and a controller programmed to selectively coordinate the component holder and the first and second imaging devices to carry out an assembly operation for assembling components of the object in which: the component holder holds a component over the first imaging device; the first imaging device captures an image of the component; the controller identifies a first reference alignment feature of the component from the image captured by the first imaging device; the component holder places the component on top of another component in the assembly zone based on the identified first reference alignment feature of the component; the second imaging device captures an overhead image of the component on top of the other component; the controller identifies a second reference alignment feature of the component from the image captured by the second imaging device; the controller validates a position of the component in the assembly zone based on the identified second reference alignment feature of the component. A clean copy of the amended Abstract is submitted herewith on a separate sheet in the Appendix to this Preliminary Amendment.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.