Flexible fixture design and automation: Review, issues and future directions

The cost of designing and fabricating fixtures can amount to 10-20% of the total manufacturing system costs. To reduce manufacturing costs, a fixture system is designed to be competent in fixturing as many workpieces as possible. In mass volume production, this can be achieved by fixturing a large quantity of the same kind of workpieces. In low-to-medium volume production, however, improvement of the flexibility of fixture systems becomes a...