RULES FOR AN EXPERT FIXTURING SYSTEM ON A CAD SCREEN USING FLEXIBLE FIXTURES

The object of this research is to develop rules for an expert system which will aid in the automatic layout of flexible fixture models on a CAD/CAM system for given applications through an interactive process. The rules are developed and implemented in PROLOG adopting the general sets of fixturing coordinates developed based on the 3:2:1-clamping concept and the geometric information such as shape and size of the workpiece to be fixtured. Surface milling is used to demonstrate the principle of the rules and applied to regular polyhedral shapes. Input to the program consists of parameters describing the workpiece to be fixtured which will initiate a search through the databases of rules and fixturing coordinates. Appropriate fixturing rules will be matched and fired to create a datafile containing fixturing points in cartesian coordinates and the list of modular fixture components to be used as an input source to the CAD system.