Frank van der Stappen and Mark Overmars
Utrecht University
Fixture Planning
Manufacturing and assembly processes often require
objects to be held in such a way that they can
resist all external wrenches. The problem
of "fixture planning" is to compute, for a
given object and a set of fixturing elements,
the set of placements of the fixturing elements
that constrain all finite and infinitesimal motions
of the object (due to applied wrenches).
As fixturing problems typically occur frequently in
manufacturing and assembly, it becomes
costly to build dedicated fixturing solutions for
each different problem.
Modular fixturing toolkits offer the advantage
of reusabilty of the fixturing elements and have
therefore gained considerable popularity. A modular
fixturing toolkit consists of a fixturing table with
a rectangular grid of holes, and a set of fixturing
elements whose positions are restricted to the holes
in the table.
Several recent publications in the field of fixture
planning aim at exploring the power of these modular
fixturing toolkits.
We give an overview of modular and non-modular fixture planning
for various types of objects and sets of fixturing
elements.