Flexible fixturing system design based on a family of novel parallel robots

Flexibility of the assembly system is crucial to the rapidly changing market, for that a family of products fabrication need to be implemented on a single production line. This paper presents a novel flexible fixturing system for sheet metal part assembly, the system is composed of reconfigurable fixtures use parallel robots as programmable fixture elements so that they can be reprogrammed for different parts. According to the fixturing requirement a work of synthesis and derivation of parallel robot configuration is conducted based on screw theory and Lie group. And a novel class of parallel fixture robots composed of a family of RUPU kinematic chains (KCs) and their derived configurations, with 3Flexibility of the assembly system is crucial to the rapidly changing market, for that a family of products fabrication need to be implemented on a single production line. This paper presents a novel flexible fixturing system for sheet metal part assembly, the system is composed of reconfigurable fixtures use parallel robots as programmable fixture elements so that they can be reprogrammed for different parts. According to the fixturing requirement a work of synthesis and derivation of parallel robot configuration is conducted based on screw theory and Lie group. And a novel class of parallel fixture robots composed of a family of RUPU kinematic chains (KCs) and their derived configurations, with 3~6 Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF), are proposed. Finally an application with ldquo4-2-1rdquo fixturing scheme is exhibited, the kinematic and constraint features are modelled by screw theory, and a screw optimum layout scheme is presented.