Abstract
As part of the Future Automated Aircraft Assembly Demonstrator developed by the University of Nottingham, this paper presents a new flexible production environment for the complete manufacturing of high-accuracy high-complexity low-volume aerospace products. The aim is to design a product-independent manufacturing and assembly system that can react to fluctuating product specifications and demands through self-reconfiguration. This environment features a flexible, holistic, and context-aware solution that includes automated positioning, drilling and fastening processes, and is suitable for different aircraft structures with scope to address other manufacturing domains in the future (e.g. automotive, naval and energy). The assembly cell features industrial robots for the handling of aircraft components, while intelligent metrology and control systems monitor the cell to ensure that the assembly process is safe and the target tolerances are met. These three modules are integrated into a single standardized interface, requiring only one operator to control the cell. Performance analyses have shown that, using the reconfigurable production environment described hereafter, a positioning accuracy better than ±0.1 mm can be achieved for large airframe components.
Highlights
The merging of the virtual and physical worlds and the fusion of the technical and business processes have led the way to a new industrial age known as Industry 4.0 [5]. This has been achieved through the deployment of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), creating a networked world in which intelligent objects communicate and interact with each other
This paper briefly introduced the concept of Evolvable Assembly Systems (EAS), a novel approach to a manufacturing environment that is able to respond rapidly to changes in product, process, and market
A real world application of such a concept was presented through the Future Automated Aircraft Assembly Demonstrator, a single cell production environment able to automatically assemble a wide range of aerospace products
Summary
The merging of the virtual and physical worlds and the fusion of the technical and business processes have led the way to a new industrial age known as Industry 4.0 [5]. The FA3D smartly combines the industrial robots’ relatively low cost and high flexibility through programming and changeable end-effectors with a high precision metrology system to reach the narrow tolerances in terms of absolute accuracy and repeatability in use in the aerospace assembly processes. This specific layout compresses the capabilities of a traditional assembly line into a single reconfigurable multi-purposes cell resulting in massive cost, space, and throughput improvements (see Fig. 1).
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