Intelligent Surface-normal Adjustment System and Application in Aeronautical Drilling Robot

Abstract

Aeronautical drilling robot has been widely adopted in aircraft manufacturing with its high efficiency and reliability. Automatic drilling, however, requires the drill bit to be perpendicular to the curved surface of fuselage. In this paper, we present an intelligent surface-normal adjustment system to deal with the problem. This system calculates surface-normal vector by obtaining three measurement positions with laser range sensors and provides correction values to an innovative binary angular adjustment mechanism to regulate the feed direction of the drilling bit in real-time. We carried out a number of experiments on the aeronautical drilling robot. The experimental results demonstrate that this system can decrease the surface-normal error to less than ±0.5°and well meet the demand of modern aircraft manufacturing.

Issues in Vision, Semi-autonomous Control, Haptics and Manipulation in Robotics for Nuclear Decommissioning

“…The selection of which will depend on the particular task. It could be that surface finish/geometry variations precludes the use of laser-based systems, in this case ultrasonic range finders can be useful but they are best for locating large flat objects [18][19][20][21]. When in contact, tactile sensing can be employed as a means to augment the initial grasp and manipulation strategies by addressing inconsistencies in the contact forces during object contact and manipulation, usually by way of monitoring an array of compliant pressure sensors of which many types are available [20].…”

The attitude adjustment algorithm in drilling end-effector for aviation

“…It can adjust the spindle axis parallel to the normal of drilling point. R Zhang et al 16 also proposed a method to adjust spindle axis with 2 degrees of freedom. However, all the parallel mechanisms for attitude adjusting are confronted with a same problem.…”