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Summary: Folding Cartons with Fixtures: A Motion Planning Approach
Liang Lu Srinivas Akella
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801
Abstract
Packaging products such as telephones and two-way ra-
dios after assembly is a common manufacturing task. Car-
ton folding is a packaging operation performed by human
operators or with fixed automation. We present a flexible
method to fold cardboard cartons using fixtures; a carton
blank is folded by moving it through a fixture with a robot.
This method of using interchangeable fixtures enables rapid
changeovers between product models. We outline a proce-
dure to design a fixture given a carton and a folding se-
quence. We present an implemented motion planning algo-
rithm that generates all folding sequences for a carton by
modeling it as a many degree of freedom robot manipulator
with revolute joints and branching links. A fixture constrains
the carton to move along paths consisting of line segments
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