Principal Investigator Martin Culpepper
Demanding applications require tens of nanometers repeatability and accuracy from their fixturing systems. Meeting these requirements calls for a means to adjust/compensate for errors in six axes without sacrificing repeatability. The goal of this research is to create “smart” fixturing systems that are capable of sensing their own alignment errors and automatically correcting them. These fixtures possess morphing/adjustable geometries that allow one to modify the relative position of assembled components and achieve better alignment. Tens of nanometers repeatability (factor of 25X improvement over the state-of-the-art) and tens of nanometers accuracy (factor of over 1000X) are enabled via this advance. Through this work, we have created the most accurate and repeatable fixtures in existence.