Modular fixture design for generalized polyhedra

The term fixturing refers to the task of immobilizing a workpiece for the purpose of performing operations such as assembly and machining. As such, fixturing is of fundamental importance to industrial manufacturing. Fixtures can either be fabricated from scratch, or assembled from a toolkit of modular components, the latter approach is termed modular fixturing. In this paper, we present a complete algorithm to automatically design fixtures for the fixture vice toolkit. The algorithm enumerates fixture configurations, consisting of peg positions, workpiece pose, and jaw separation, for a given generalized polyhedral workpiece. A generalized polyhedral prismatic workpiece is defined to have a generalized polygonal silhouette, with a boundary composed of linear edges and circular area.