Precision Fixturing, Workholding, and Grasping

Fixturing or workholding is an important tooling technology for product manufacturing.  Fixtures are necessary to immobilize, support, and locate the workpieces, during the course of machining, assembly, or inspection.  For precision manufacturing, the major concern of fixture design is the accuracy of workpiece localization and balanced force-closure considerations in the phase of fixture layout design. The problem has become particularly critical for the industry of manufacturing delicate parts of complex shapes and assemblies such as turbine airfoils.

1. Efficient algorithms for fixture synthesis in a point-set domain based on the concept of optimal design of experiments, which are capable of handling mixed continuous-combinatorial difficulties.

2. Optimal clamping for balanced frictional force-closure requirements.

3. Accurate contact modeling and analysis for realistic locator geometries with curvature and compliance considerations, which will improve modeling accuracy for high-precision localization.

4. Stiffness characterization and synthesis of fixtured workpiece with locator contacts.

5. Force passivity and hybrid force closure in fixturing and grasping.

• HKSAR Research Grants Council (RGC) Competitive Earmarked Research Grant (CERG), Interactive Haptic Simulation for Virtual Fixture Prototyping (CUHK4376/02E).

• The Chinese University of Hong Kong Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant.

• HKSAR Research Grants Council (RGC) Competitive Earmarked Research Grant (CERG), 3D Grasp Planning with Applications to Automated Fixture Layout Design (CUHK4217/01E).

• The Chinese University of Hong Kong Direct Research Grant, High-Performance Workpiece Fixturing.