Endorse experiment gives robots a sense of touch allowing them to perform delicate sanding of highly sensitive components in aircraft manufacturing industry
Challenge:
– Automate the grinding and sanding treatment of delicate surfaces of aerospace components.
Solution:
Using an industrial robot Kuka KR 10 as a collaborative robot capable of treating delicate surfaces of interior parts of aircrafts. State-of-the-art motion planning software and a straightforward calibration procedure allows mapping the surface roughness at the micrometre level. The provided sensitivity and precision enabled measuring the quality of the treated surface, and to quantify the procedures in the production line.
Particular attention is payed to human safety issues by introducing laser scanners that can predict and avoid human collision.
Design of factory with new flexible robots
Implementation time: 10 months
Implementation cost: €193,462
Output:
– Increase the number of treated products from 2 to 3.
– Increase the surface area grinded with a robot from 60% to 80%.
– Automated quality control detecting surface roughness on a micrometer scale and localize it with cm precision.
Impact:
The case demonstrated how robotic technology can find its place in the most demanding tasks, where one is expected to control both the position and the force applied on the environment. These preliminary results show the potential of incorporating ever more robotic technologies in the EnAe’s production line. However, the scope of this algorithm is not limited to grinding and sanding, but can rather be applied to various other tasks that require the robot to provide a delicate touch.
This experiment has been supported by Horse project. (See this experiment in project’s site)
Project:
Enterprises:
Enikon Aerospace d.o.o. (End user); Larics Laboratory; ICENT (Tech Provider); Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb (RTO) ‘
Sector
Transport
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