Development of a novel integrated automated assembly system for large volume components in outdoor environment

Abstract

In recent years, automatic assembly technology is widely used in the field of aerospace and automobile manufacturing and engineering. For large-scale components assembly, the pose alignment mechanism always occupies too much space and the cost of measurement system is also too expensive. In this paper, a new integrated automated assembly system is developed which costs much less and has a compact structure. Firstly, a novel three-layer pose adjustment mechanism consisting of two parallel mechanisms is designed, which we call a 6-DOF mixed linkage mechanism. The proposed mechanism is connected by a planar 3-DOF parallel mechanism and a 4-point lifting parallel mechanism in series. Secondly, a high-accuracy long-range measuring system composed of low-cost tilt sensor and laser sensors is proposed. The whole measuring process is divided into several major alignment steps to aid the automated assembly task. Finally, a prototype system that automatically assembles large radar antenna is set up. Various validation experiments are performed, and the results show that integrated large scale automated assembly system can achieve relatively high efficiency and accuracy for assembly task.