| 1. |
- Kihlman, Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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6DOF metrology-integrated robot control
- 2003
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Ingår i: SAE Technical Paper Series. - Montreal, QC, Canada : Society of Automotive Engineers. - 0148-7191.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper describes ongoing research into Metrology-integrated robot control. The research is a part of an ongoing EU funded aircraft industry project – ADFAST*. The ADFAST project tries to implement the use of industrial robots in low-volume production, high-demand-on-accuracy operations and for dynamic force compensation. To detect and compensate deflection in industrial robots during a process, the robot uses a metrology system. The metrology system supervises the tool center point of the robot as it executes its processes. Leica has recently released a new metrology system; the LTD800, which measures distances with laser interferometry and can simultaneously measure orientation of targets, through photogrammetry, using an additional camera on top of the measuring unit. This paper will describe theory and results from tests performed on integrating the LTD800 with the robot.
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| 2. |
- Kihlman, Henrik
(författare)
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Affordable automation for airframe assembly : developing of key enabling technologies
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Building aircraft is a challenging field. An aircraft has a life expectancy of 40 years, compared to just 10 years for a car. Given the vibrations of flying at close to Mach one at an altitude of 10,000 meters, these machines must function flawlessly in a tough environment. This demands high quality in the assembly processes. The typical part joining process in the automotive industry is welding, whereas in the aircraft industry, assembly is made through drilling, followed by fastening. The typical tolerances for part location in aircraft assembly, as well as for hole drilling, is +/- 0.2 mm.This dissertation discusses the use of industrial robots, widely used for welding and pick-and-place operation for automotive industry, in the automation of the aircraft industry, and specifically for the drilling of holes in the assembly process of airframe parts. The dissertation presents how a new drilling technology called orbital drilling is incorporated with and industrial robot. Orbital drilling reduces the cutting forces up to ten times compared to conventional drilling using a spiral cutter.The robot is also utilized for performing changeovers between different airframe structure types. A novel jointed reconfigurable tooling system called Affordable Reconfigurable Tooling (ART) is presented, which uses the robot to reconfigure flexible fixture modules. The ART system can also be rebuilt, which means that the tool is dismantled and reused for a completely different product family (e.g. wings, fins or fuselage sections). This is made possible through a modular framework, i.e. not welded as with conventional tooling, but rather jointed by screws.Robots, originally developed for the automotive industry, have an accuracy which is ten times less accurate than that required for aerospace applications. To help meet this limitation in the use of robots in aircraft assembly, an additional metrology system, used in the aircraft industry for calibrating assembly tooling, is integrated into the robot controller. The feedback loop enables the robot to be positioned to ±0.05 mm absolute accuracy. This integration is made possible by existing embedded software packages for the robot and the metrology system.The processes in the system are programmed in a software package with an intuitive user interface in a 3D-environment, normally used for the offline-programming of robots in automotive industry. The planning is intuitive, and an approach towards a process planning abstraction level is presented where processes are defined directly on the coordinate frames constituting the robot trajectories and manual operations. Tolerance on accuracy requirements are dynamically programmed in the same environment. The metrology system, working online with the robot controller, eliminates most of the calibration work required in traditional robot programming. Changes in the operation planning take less than a minute to run physically with the best tolerance.
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| 3. |
- Kihlman, Henrik, 1973-, et al.
(författare)
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Affordable reconfigurable tooling
- 2002
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Ingår i: SAE Technical Paper Series. - 400 Commonwealth Drive, Warrendale, PA, United States : Society of Automotive Engineers. - 0148-7191.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Since the early days of aircraft assembly, welded steel structures called Conventional Tooling has been used for positioning and holding parts in place during assembly. This paper presents a new tooling concept called Affordable Reconfigurable Tooling, where a robot is not only used for drilling and riveting but also for reconfiguring the tool itself. The concept consists of modular units that can either be reconfigured between products of the same family of assembly or rebuilt between product families. The research is part of an ongoing EU-founded aircraft industry project - ADFAST*.
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| 4. |
- Kihlman, Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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Flexapods - Flexible Tooling at SAAB for Building the NEURON Aircraft
- 2010
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Ingår i: SAE Technical Paper Series. - 400 Commonwealth Drive, Warrendale, PA, United States : SAE International. - 0148-7191.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Building prototype aircrafts is costly in tooling especially since only one aircraft is being built. Today's most common tooling strategy is to weld together a beam framework. Welded framework solutions have long lead times both in design and manufacturing and once the aircraft is assembled the tool becomes obsolete. Flexible tooling strategy uses non-welded tooling thus it can be changed and re-used for future products. Early version of a new aircraft model is always hampered by frequent changes in its design, which is cumbersome to handle in a welded framework solution. This paper presents a flexible assembly tooling solutions based on Flexapods and BoxJoint. The Flexapods are commercialized reconfigurable tooling units that are manually adjusted injunction with a laser tracker to a final positional accuracy of +/? 0,05 mm absolute accuracy. An operator software program called the Flexapod control panel collect metrology data in real-time and an operator screen show graphics on how to manually jog the Flexapod joints to reach the final Cartesian 3D-coordinate. The Flexapods are installed in a modular steel based framework solution called BoxJoint. A complete PLM package has been developed for the solution where the Flexapods are configured in CATIA using an add-on package to CATIA called the Flexapod configurator. All CATIA data is stored in ENOVIA. Once the Flexapod fixture is designed in CATIA a file, containing all Cartesian coordinates of the Flexapods, is exported and loaded into the Flexapod control panel on the workshop floor. A previous paper on the Flexapod as an early concept and a paper on BoxJoint have been presented at SAE Aerofast. This paper follows up on these results and presents a case study at SAAB Aeronautics for implementing the first industrial solution of Flexapods to build the military unmanned aerial vehicle - nEURON.
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| 5. |
- Kihlman, Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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On the Use of Force Feedback for Cost Efficient Robotic Drilling
- 2007
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Ingår i: SAE Technical Paper Series. - Los Angeles, CA, US : Society of Automotive Engineers. - 0148-7191.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Drilling is one of the most costly and labour-intensive operations in aircraft assembly. Rather than automating with expensive fixtures and precise machinery, our approach is to make use of standard low-cost robot equipment in combination with sensor feedback. The focus is to eliminate the sliding movement of the end-effector during the clamp-up, called the skating effect, and to keep the end-effector orthogonal to the surface, thus avoiding holes that are not perpendicular. To that end, force feedback is used for building up pressure to clamp up an end-effector to the work-piece surface prior to drilling. The system, including the planning of force parameters for each hole to be drilled, was programmed in DELMIA. The drilling was accomplished with the aid of an extension to the ABB Rapid language called ExtRapid, which is an XML-like code that is interpreted by the force feedback controller downstream in the process. Although experimental results are from drilling, the conceptual idea is believed to be useful in many other applications requiring external sensor feedback control of industrial robots.
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| 6. |
- Millar, Alison, et al.
(författare)
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Reconfigurable Flexible Tooling for Aerospace Wing Assembly
- 2009
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Ingår i: SAE Technical Paper Series. - 400 Commonwealth Drive, Warrendale, PA, United States : Society of Automotive Engineers. - 0148-7191.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Traditionally, in the civil aerospace industry, assembly fixtures are large, bespoke, permanent structures that are costly to both design and manufacture. Additionally, the time to design, manufacture and install a large fixture can be significant with lead times in excess of 24 months. Within Airbus Operations Ltd there is a requirement to reduce non-recurring costs, reduce the time to market and improve the capacity and flexibility of equipment. This means that while the costs and lead times must be reduced, the utilisation of the tooling should be increased. Flexible and reconfigurable fixtures have not yet been deployed within Airbus Operations Ltd due to the assembly sizes and complex component configurations. However, they offer the potential for reducing costs by utilising off the shelf components. Using standard parts and implementing design tools can reduce the design time. The reconfigurable and flexible nature of the fixture will also enable embodiment of late component design changes with minimal time and cost impact. This paper presents the design, manufacture and installation of a reconfigurable fixture to assemble a wing box section in a research environment. This tooling demonstrator is then being used to evaluate the technical and industrial benefits of reconfigurable fixtures for aircraft wing sub assemblies and assemblies at Airbus.
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