Development of an automated reconfigurable device for affordable fixturing

• Fixtures are used in manufacturing to hold and position products or workpieces. Linköping University has over a period of several years developed an approach to flexible fixturing that relies on an outer measuring system to ensure accuracy rather than the more common approaches of high internal accuracy or a built-in chain of tolerances. The Linköping system fuses modularity, a rebuildable framework, with reconfigurability, through the means of adjustable devices. To address the need for speed in reconfiguration an automated approach has been developed as a proof-ofconcept. The system consists of electrical motors attached to the legs of the Flexapod 6, a PC, controller cards and an external measuring system. The measuring system feeds information to the PC that is utilized to calculate desired leg length using a Visual Basic program that communicates with CATIA V5. This program then sets signals to the motor controller cards which run the actuators. Due to the motors used the accuracy achieved are in the range of +/-0.15 mm but this may be enhanced with other types of motors developed for higher strengthrather than speed. The system can be further developed by having the actuators as the actual legs of the Flexapod, making it a cheaper Hexapod robot. The paper presents the automated Flexapod 6 in the current system along with possible further development.

Nyckelord

Tooling

Hexapod

Reconfigurable

Manufacturing

RMS

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