Workholding-analysis and planning

Abstract

With an increasing interest in manufacturing towards computer-assisted production in small batch sizes, researchers have begun to focus on the design, analysis and planning algorithms for workholding (also called fixturing), calibration and tool-path generation. The author focuses on the problem of workholding and reviews how various qualitative and quantative approaches of grasping theory can be applied to this problem mutatis mutandis. However, the problems in workholding differ from robot-hand grasping problems in two fundamental ways; the accuracy and ambient force (resulting from fluctuating cutting loads) requirements are rather stringent, and the available fixtures are geometrically more specialized as compared to robot-hands. These differences lead to further interesting questions.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>