Low-Cost Automation for Aircraft Assembly

In this paper solution for low-cost automation of aircraft assembly is presented. The concept of this development is closely related to “Lean Automation”, which in this case concerns the use of modern standard equipment such as standard robots, PC-computers and a newly developed spatial sensor system for precision measurements of positions. The robot is used to perform reconfiguration of tooling modules that are possible to be configured/reconfigured in six degrees of freedom. A prototype developed as the result of an EU-project called ADFAST* has been evaluated at Linköping University in Sweden. Technical functionality is reported where the robot manages to configure the flexible tooling modules to a total error bellow 50 μm. This paper presents the results on the portion of the project addressing robot, metrology system and tooling.