Design and Experiment of a Robot Automatic Drilling System

Drilling plays a significant process in the aircraft manufacturing. This paper develops a robot automatic drilling system for processing the titanium alloy, aluminum alloy and laminated composites component of aircraft. The accurate robot drilling system is comprised of ABB IRB6640-235 robot, drilling end-effector, end-effctor control system and vision system. Experimental results show that the system absolute location precision is within 0.3mm, and the drilling efficiency can be up to four holes per minute. The drilling efficiency and quality of the aircraft component can be increased immensely by the developed robot automatic drilling system.