ROPTALMU - A New Concept of Crawling Portable Robotic System for Wing Spars Drilling

In this paper a new concept of portable-crawler robotic system for wing spars drilling during their assembly phase will be presented.

The solution developed, named ROPTALMU, consists of a drilling robot that is brought along the shop floor to the wing assembly tooling by means of an automated guided vehicle (AGV). Once in front of the tooling, the drilling robot is detached from the AGV and fixed securely and accurately to the tooling structure. Then a first set of holes is drilled inside the robot's reach. After this, in order to work in another product's working zone, the robot is able to walk automatically along the tooling. Once the work finished in the whole product, the robot is put again in the AGV and brought to the next product tooling.

The system has been conceived so that it is able to adapt to a wide variety (different families) of wing spars performing drilling tasks on materials such as aluminum, CF and titanium.

This way ROPTALMU constitutes a portable and affordable system that provides great flexibility in terms of aeronautic production.