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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LABOR (Lean robotized AssemBly and cOntrol of composite aeRostructures)

Teaser

Summary

Nowadays, assembly of fuselage aerostructures is largely a manual process, especially for regional aircraft manufacturing lines, where most of the junction areas have very limited access. Use of automated solutions is very limited due not only to severe restrictions of access in the assembly jigs, but also to the high positioning accuracy required in the assembly procedures, always out of the typical range of industrial robot absolute accuracy. Therefore, automatic machines and robots are today used in aeronautic assembly lines only for large aircraft manufacturing and are integrated into complex ad-hoc machine constructions.
According to the Global Market Forecast, there is a strong need to ramp up the productivity in the aeronautic industry and main aeronautic manufacturers are heavily investing in flexible systems to reduce costs, improve quality and boost productivity. Drilling, fastener insertion, riveting, sealing, coating and painting, in addition to material handling, are the most recurrent operations in aircraft assembly lines. The majority of these operations are performed by machines and big robots (i.e., high-cost rigid solutions), but still a high number of drilling and riveting operations are performed by human operators. The automation of such operations would lead great and immediate benefits to aircraft industry in terms of production rate. In this context, robotics becomes a key technology enabler, but its adoption in the aeronautic industry is only at an early stage.
The general objective of the project is to increase the level of automation of the current assembly process of fuselage parts such as panels and frames (focusing on regional aircrafts production), by means of lean and flexible automated solutions in replacement of manual assembly or complex ad-hoc machine constructions and high-payload robots.
In particular, the project targets the realization of a Self-Adaptive Robotic Cell that combines:
- small/medium size robots to provide higher capability of adaptation and easy integration in shop floor already existing facilities;
- adaptive processing tools to perform in an automatic way the different assembly tasks;
- advanced vision systems to reference the robots and check the quality of the work performed;
- distributed intelligence to build a more flexible solution.

Work performed

This Innovation Action (IA) project primarily focuses on the realization of a Self-Adaptive Robotic Cell improving productivity in the assembly process of fuselage parts. For this purpose, it includes prototyping, testing and demonstration in a real production environment (Topic Manager production plant).
The work plan of the project includes 7 work packages finalized to scientific and technological development, one work package (WP8) devoted to project management and one (WP9) to dissemination, exploitation of knowledge and training.
At the end of the first 18 months of the project, most of the Work Packages are in progress and some have been already finalized.
WP1 is concluded and the general and technical requirements for the robotic cell development have been defined and agreed with the Topic Manager.
Activities of WP2 have been also completed, with the definition of Human-centric ergonomic criteria for assessing workers posture risk during assembly operations. Aircraft panel frame (jig), robot tools, and the whole mechanical structure of the robotic cell have been fully designed, based on results of simulations (jig) and laboratory pilot prototypes (vision inspection tool, drilling tool and fastening tool).
The test plan structure of the three main cell components (drilling and fastening tools, robots and vision inspection system) has been defined in WP3, including information on dimensional checks, functional tests, characterization and performances validation according to panel assembly specifications.
WP4 plays a central role since it includes most of the development activities. Setup and commissioning of the jig is in progress. The drilling tool has been mounted; fasteners warehouse, drilling tips warehouse and inspection tool have been assembled. Software architecture has been defined, and the first software modules have been implemented. The development of holes inspection algorithms has been started and preliminary tests have been performed on the inspection tool. The force-based cooperative drilling algorithm has been preliminarily developed. Simulations for cycle-time optimization have been performed. Human-machine collaboration algorithms have been tested on a simulated environment.
In the exploitation workpackage preliminary training activities for Topic Managerâ€™s personnel have been already performed. The project website has been setup and it is on-line. Dissemination activities have been carried out both towards the scientific community (publications) and the general public (magazine articles).

Final results

Solutions that make use of heavy, huge and unsafe robots are very common in the aeronautics manufacturing field. Such high-payload robots operate in isolated and wide areas where the human presence is forbidden during normal operation and they are mostly allocated to a single task. With respect to the state-of-the-art, the project proposes a different approach using small, lightweight, low cost and flexible robots in conjunction with additional external axes to ensure proper enlargement of the workspace.
The architecture of the Self-Adaptive Robotic Cell developed in the project is based on different intelligent modules acting as Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs), able to adapt and self-organize to change the manufacturing task when needed; modularity allows their recombination and reorganization, while communication through the network permits information exchange to accomplish the final overall task. The robotic cell will also allow human workers to operate on the airframe part without any physical separation between human and robot workspaces, implementing robot workspace monitoring capabilities (mainly focusing on human figure detection and human intention prediction).
The adoption of robotic solutions for drilling and fastening in which robots collaborate with humans would certainly reduce musculoskeletal troubles caused by repetitive actions (this kind of troubles are the first cause of occupational disease and lost workdays).
Small/medium size anthropomorphic robots will permit to increase the flexibility of the cell with the possibility of using the same tools and robots for different tasks: the combination of robots with high-resolution vision sensors reduces the necessity of costly tools and jigs. The avoidance of large and custom fixtures and jigs, dramatically cuts the assembly costs and save additional space, while the adoption of generic anthropomorphic robots allows realistic simulations and optimization of processes by adopting CAD/CAM tools. Enabling new programming concepts for robots, robotics will be made much more affordable in European manufacturing industry, while still relying on the know-how of human operators (that would be in charge, for example, of teaching robots to perform tedious and non-ergonomic tasks). Therefore, human operators can be allocated to more value-added tasks.
In summary, project outcomes will permit to increase productivity in the assembly of regional aircraft composite fuselage panels, will promote high-qualifying jobs, and will improve social well-being by increasing safety of workers.