Modular Vacuum-Based Fixturing System for Adaptive Disassembly Workspace Integration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modular vacuum-based fixturing system using soft balloon-like grippers for stable disassembly of complex-shaped household appliances, improving success rates over traditional rigid fixtures.

Contribution

It presents a novel soft gripping fixture system with a stability-aware planning framework for adaptive disassembly of complex geometries.

Findings

Higher success rates compared to rigid fixtures

Improved placement stability during screw removal

Effective conformability to complex surfaces

Abstract

The disassembly of small household appliances poses significant challenges due to their complex and curved geometries, which render traditional rigid fixtures inadequate. In this paper, we propose a modular vacuum-based fixturing system that leverages commercially available balloon-type soft grippers to conform to arbitrarily shaped surfaces and provide stable support during screw-removal tasks. To enable a reliable deployment of the system, we develop a stability-aware planning framework that samples the bottom surface of the target object, filters candidate contact points based on geometric continuity, and evaluates support configurations using convex hull-based static stability criteria. We compare the quality of object placement under different numbers and configurations of balloon hands. In addition, real-world experiments were conducted to compare the success rates of traditional rigid fixtures with our proposed system. The results demonstrate that our method consistently achieves higher success rates and superior placement stability during screw removal tasks.