Lean robotized AssemBly and cOntrol of composite aeRostructures

Project Information

LABOR

Grant agreement ID: 785419

DOI

10.3030/785419

Project closed

EC signature date 13 February 2018

Start date 1 March 2018

End date 30 June 2021

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 2 509 375,00

EU contribution

€ 1 995 062,50

Coordinated by

AEA s.r.l.
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - LABOR (Lean robotized AssemBly and cOntrol of composite aeRostructures)

Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2021-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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.
At the end of the project, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to use medium size robots for the assembly of curved panels and that advanced vision systems can be used to reference the robots in an automated way and to check the quality of the work performed. Anyway, the complexity of the cell and its use is still high, and this part should be improved in order to allow a larger use of the cell and of its different components.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

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.
The work plan includes 7 work packages finalized to scientific and technological development, one work package devoted to project management and one to dissemination, exploitation of knowledge and training.
The technological and scientific developments have been carried out in the first 3 WPs, where the cell and its components have been designed and realized. WP4 can be considered as the main work package of the entire project since it was the work package where most of the development activities are carried out. Virtual simulations have been carried out to support the final integration phase and to support the optimization of the human robot collaboration, such as ergonomics issues. In WP5 the tests have been carried out on the integrated cell in order to verify the correct functioning of the different components. The tests have been performed on representative coupons and after the completion of the tests, the complete cell has been partially dismounted and shipped to the Topic Manager Plant.
In the final part of the project, WP6 activities have been devoted to the tuning of the cell parameters with respect to the working conditions for the assembly operations on full scale panels. First tests on curved small-scale panels and on a single full-scale panel have been performed to verify the whole automatic assembly and control execution cycle.
The final part of the project has been largely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Therefore, it has been demonstrated that the cell is able to work on all the required components using the setup of the full-scale test panel, installing on it a representative set of components to be processed on all the six different panels of the final demonstrator. It was not possible to process all the defined panels, as described in the DoA.
The results of the project have been presented in different conferences and a specific workshop has been organized during the 10th EASN conference. Different articles have been published and presented.
In the exploitation, training activities for Topic Manager’s personnel have been performed and the different exploitable results have been identified.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

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 has proposed a different approach using medium size, 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).
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.

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