ABSTRACT
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 planning17 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 occur frequently in manufacturing and assembly, it be comes costly to build a dedicated fixturing solution for each different problem. Modular fixturing toolkits offer the advantage of reusability 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 fix ture planning aim at exploring the power of these mod ular fixturing toolkits. We give an overview of modular and non-modular fixture planning for various types of objects and sets of fixturing elements.
