Evolvable Assembly Systems is a five year UK research council funded project into flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems. The principal goal of the research programme has been to define and validate the vision and support architecture, theoretical models, methods and algorithms for Evolvable Assembly Systems as a new platform for open, adaptable, context-aware and cost effective production. The project is now coming to a close; the concepts developed during the project have been implemented on a variety of demonstrators across a number of manufacturing domains including automotive and aerospace assembly. This paper will show the progression of demonstrators and applications as they increase in complexity, specifically focussing on the Future Automated Aerospace Assembly Phase 1 technology demonstrator (FA3D). The FA3D Phase 1 demonstrated automated assembly of aerospace products using precision robotic processes in conjunction with lowcost reconfigurable fixturing supported by large volume metrology. This was underpinned by novel agent-based control for transformable batch-size-of-one production. The paper will conclude by introducing Phase 2 of the Future Automated Aerospace Assembly Demonstrator -currently in development -that will translate the Evolvable Assembly Systems research to a higher technology readiness level and address the challenges of scalable and transformable manufacturing systems.

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Aerospace production systems face increasing requirements for flexibility and reconfiguration, along with considerations of cost, utilisation, and efficiency. This drives a need for systems with a small number of automation platforms (e.g. industrial robots) that can make use of a larger number of end effectors that are potentially flexible or multifunctional. This leads to the challenge of ensuring that the configuration and location of each end effector is tracked by the system at all times, even in the face of manual adjustments, to ensure that the correct processes are applied to the product at the right time. We present a solution based on a Data Distribution Service that provides the system with full awareness of the context of its automation platforms and end effectors. The solution is grounded with an example use case from WingLIFT, a research programme led by a large aerospace manufacturer. The WingLIFT project in which this solution was developed builds on the adaptive systems approach from the Evolvable Assembly Systems project, with focus on extending and increasing the aerospace industrial applicability of plug and produce techniques. The design of this software solution is described from multiple perspectives, and accompanied by details of a physical demonstration cell that is in the process of being commissioned.

In this work, an iterative learning control (ILC) algorithm is proposed for industrial manipulators. The proposed ILC algorithm works coordinately with the inverse dynamics of the manipulator and a feedback controller. The entire control scheme has the ability of compensating both repetitive and non-repetitive disturbances; guaranteeing the control accuracy of the first implementation; and improving the control accuracy of the manipulator progressively with successive iterations. In order to build the the convergence of the proposed ILC algorithm, a composite energy function is developed. A case study on a four degree of freedom industrial manipulator is demonstrated to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. By implementing the ILC algorithm, the maximum root mean square error of the control accuracy is improved from 0.0262 rad to 0.0016 rad within ten iterations.