Analysis of fixturing quality for a variable number of fixturing points and friction values

Abstract

This paper copes with the automatic determination of fixturing points on 2D and 3D free-form objects, for any number of fixturing points and a variable friction coefficient at the contacts. A software tool that implements the searching algorithm, and that is also able to analyze the quality of any given fixturing, is presented. An analysis on 2D and 3D objects has been performed with this tool, that allows to determine how many points are necessary and which coefficient of friction is required in each case in order to fix the object with a given quality. The tool has been released as open software.