Design and development of flexible fixturing system for handling irregular shaped components

Manufacturing industry is a rapid developing area and requires new technologies and concepts to increase the profit margin through high production rate and high quality. To have a sufficient and higher production rate there should be competent fixturing systems, because fixtures perform major tasks such as locating, holding and supporting components during manufacturing processes. Due to the large variety of the components manufactured in the industry, the fixture systems differ from one another. Therefore dedicated fixtures are widely used in the industry. Aerospace and automotive industries are facing problems such as huge space allocation for large number of dedicated fixtures, long lead time for designing and fabricating and low flexibility to change the setup at the modifications of the design. These problems cause to increase the overall cost and slow down the production. A reconfigurable or modular fixture can be introduced as a single fixture for set of components. Although it reduces the number of fixtures, leads to other issues such as high knowledge and skills required to change the setup and inadaptability with robot cells and flexible manufacturing systems because of human involvements. Flexible fixtures can be used to minimize the problems associated with irregular shaped components. This paper discusses proposed solutions of an ongoing project on flexible fixturing system for handling irregular shaped components. Alternative concepts introduced in the paper are flexible and reconfigurable. Therefore they can be applied to industries such as aerospace, automotive, stamping and ship building.