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Summary: 346 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION, VOL. 16, NO. 4, AUGUST 2000
Folding Cartons with Fixtures: A Motion
Planning Approach
Liang Lu and Srinivas Akella, Member, IEEE
Abstract--Packaging products such as telephones and two-way
radios after assembly is a common manufacturing task. Carton
folding is a packaging operation typically performed by human op-
erators 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 uses inter-
changeable fixtures to enable rapid changeovers between product
models. We outline an approach to design a fixture given a carton
and a folding sequence. We present an implemented motion plan-
ning algorithm that generates all folding sequences for a carton by
modeling it kinematically as a many degree-of-freedom robot ma-
nipulator with revolute joints and branching links. Folding fixtures
constrain the carton motion to paths consisting of line segments in
its configuration space. We characterize the set of valid paths for
these carton robots and generate them using the motion planner.
To illustrate the method, we selected a folding sequence for an ex-
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