Validation and Identification of Optimal Fixturing Scheme Using VR

Fixtures are important components in manufacturing systems. Fixturing changes because of manufacturing changing from mass production to production in smaller batches and higher variety of products. Computer-aided fixture design (CAFD) systems automate the process of fixture design and verification. Research work has mainly concentrated either on automating the CAFD process or on making it user-friendly and interactive. However a final fixturing scheme may not be optimal because different users may need fixtures to meet different requirements, this paper proposes a conceptual module for the fixture validation to compare, test and analyze various combinations of fixturing elements. A fixture validation model is developed using a virtual reality (VR) system to support the idea presented in this paper.