Selected aspects of modular fixtures design for car body production

Nowadays, technical design is supported with a computer hardware and software. In order to ensure proper efficiency and comfort of the designer's work, it is necessary to have hardware with good enough parameters and software able to transform concept into a virtual world. Firts of all, designing modular fixture for car body assembly it is obligate to obtain the necessary input data [2, 4]. It is connected with the close cooperation of designs engineers with the process designer and robotics. The sequence of manual or robotized operations and also the order of putting parts to the station must be clarified. Cooperating devices should be defined to avoid potential collisions. The correctness of this data is necessary for the designer to select the right tooling, and then to project the complete device. After receiving the input data, design engineer has to plan the method of picking up all degrees of freedom of every car's body part. An important element of constructing the modular fixtures in the automotive industry is design methodology for manufacture and assembly (DFMA). Designing such types of fixtures is time-consuming. Therefore, to make work easier in case of structural changes (face-lifting) compliance with the DFMA principles is indispensable.