Research on automatic planning of main clamping points in rapid fixture design system

The automation of fixture planning plays a vital role in improving the efficiency of fixture design and manufacture. An automatic approach for rapid fixture planning was presented to determinate the three main clamping points based on geometry analysis. The processing procedure of this approach consist of four steps, such as: extraction of workpiece model projecting outline boundary, simplification of the boundary, determination of feasible clamping plans and acquirement of the optimum plan. According to the above approach, a rapid fixture automatic design system which based on UG/NX platform has been developed, and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by a given example.