Generic fixture design algorithms for minimal modular fixture toolkits

Fixturing, i.e. the process of immobilizing a work-piece for manufacturing or assembly operations, is a fundamental task in manufacturing. Fixtures can either be fabricated from scratch or assembled from a toolkit of modular components; the latter approach is termed modular xturing. Recently, many researchers have proposed generate and test xture design algorithms for minimal modular xture toolkits where minimal xture toolkits incorporate a single degree of freedom and constrain xture elements to a nite number of locations. Generate and test strategies have succeeded because minimal xture toolkits can only x-ture generic workpieces in a nite number of ways. In this paper, we present alternative minimal toolkits and two generic xture design algorithms: a complete enumeration algorithm based upon the generate and test paradigm, and an eecacious heuristic hill climbing algorithm. Our generate and test design algorithm is based upon a duality we observed between xture design and object recognition from sparse probe data. In particular, we reduce the task of completely enumerating xtures to the task of constructing complete indexing tables, a previously solved problem 18, 19].