Asimov 1 is an open-source humanoid robot by Menlo Research. Anyone can download the CAD and build one. That makes the assembly guide as important as the robot: it has to work for people who have never seen it before.
A week of writing for one module
The torso alone has 170 unique parts. Menlo’s engineer wrote its assembly guide by hand: working out the build order, taking images from the CAD and describing every step. It took 7 working days, for one module of one robot.
That is normal. Work instructions get written after the design is done, by the same engineers who are needed for the next design. So they arrive late, or they arrive thin.
30 minutes from the same CAD
We took the STEP file of the torso. Oneshot worked out the build order and turned it into a 3D work instruction: 21 steps, each showing which parts go in, where they go and from which angle, on the 3D model. We checked it step by step against the engineer’s guide.
Total time: 30 minutes.
We have since made the left arm the same way, from one STEP file. It plays live on our homepage.
What this means for a machine builder
If a torso with 170 parts takes 30 minutes instead of 7 days, a new product no longer waits a week for its instructions. Your engineers review and approve instead of writing from scratch. And your assemblers get the instruction while the design is still fresh.