Planning of Modular Fixtures in a Robotic Assembly System

Increasing product varieties is beneficial for companies in terms of expanding the market and harmful in terms of increasing manufacturing costs. Designing and fabricating different fixtures for producing different products with different geometries is a significant portion of the manufacturing costs. To overcome to this problem in a mid-volume mid-variety robotic assembly system, an optimization model is developed to minimize hole-pattern modular fixtures’ preparation time and efforts. Using this model, the best locations for placing different products and jigging-pins are determined, considering all possible part's translations and rotations on the holder. The model is solved by GAMS using the BARON solver for different examples to prove the efficacy of the proposed model.