Workholding. Analysis and planning

With an increasing interest in manufacturing towards computer-assisted production in small batch sizes, researchers have begun to focus on the design, analysis and planning algorithms for workholding (also called fixturing), calibration, tool-path generation. In this paper, we focus on the problem of workholding and review how various recently developed qualitative and quantitative approaches of grasping theory can be applied to this problem mutatis mutandis. However, the problems in workholding differ from robot-hand grasping problems in two fundamental ways, namely: (1) The accuracy and ambient force (resulting from fluctuating cutting loads) requirements are rather stringent (2) The available fixtures are geometrically more specialized as compared to robot-hands. In the concluding section, we reflect on how these differences lead to further interesting and challenging questions.