Metrology Assisted Assembly of Airplane Structure Elements

Abstract

Geometric deformations in large components like airplane shells caused by e.g. gravitation influences have to be compensated before assembly. The research objective is to develop a metrology assisted robot based assembly system that detects deformations and compensate them through force controlled movements of the robots. The determination of robot compensation movements uses a model of the components deformation behaviour. For the determination of the model parameters an identification process is developed, which uses samples of the real component deformation behaviour caused by defined external forces to approximate the parameters (e.g. stiffness) of the component.