Airbus Automatic wing box assembly developments

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Automatic wing box assembly developments

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Automatic wing box
assembly
developments
Brian Rooks
The continuing growth in air travel has
spawned major expansions in commercial
airliner manufacture, not least by Airbus, the
European partnership in which BAE Systems
has a 20 percent shareholding and European
Aeronautic Defence and Space Company
(EADS) 80 percent. Airbus UK, which is
responsible for the wings of all Airbus models,
has made major investments to increase
production and satisfy market demand as well
as reduce costs and further improve quality. A
significant proportion of this spend has been
aimed at improving wing assembly by
reducing reliance on manual methods and
dedicated fixturing. Included in this agenda is
research to develop and prove-out methods
for automating wing box assembly, and the
second phase of the Automated Wing Box
Assembly (AWBA) project has recently been
completed at Airbus UK's Broughton plant
with part funding under the UK government's
Civil Aviation Research and Demonstration
(CARAD) programme.
Airbus UK, which employs over 9,500 ±
equally split between Filton in Bristol and
Broughton in North Wales ± is the UK's
national entity of the new Airbus Integrated
Company (AIC), which began operation on 1
January 2001. AIC, which incorporates the
``old'' Airbus Industrie and all the major
Airbus activities of BAE Systems and EADS,
generated a turnover of $17.2 billion in 2000.
Its ``fleet'' of 14 aircraft range in size from the
new, single-aisle, 100-seater A318 to the
recently launched, 550-seater, ``doubledecker''
A380 that now has firm
commitments from six airlines.
The UK headquarters of Airbus UK at
Filton is also home to the main UK design
and engineering facilities, while the principal
manufacturing plant is at Broughton. The
latter was established in 1938 by Armstrong
Whitworth, and has a proud history in British
aircraft manufacture. It built over half the
Lancaster bombers that went into the second
world war service and later the Comet jetliner.
Its association with Airbus began in 1971
(then Hawker Siddeley Aviation), as subcontractor
for the wings of the first Airbus,
the A300. Every wing of the 2544 aircraft so
far delivered by Airbus was built at
Broughton, as will the 1626, on order at the
end of 2000. These are delivered to the final
assembly lines at Airbus Deutschland
(Bremen and Hamburg) and Airbus France
(Toulouse).
The author
Brian Rooks is an Associate Editor of this journal.
Keywords
Robots, Aircraft industry, Assembly
Abstract
A demonstrator cell has been developed at Airbus UK for
building large aircraft wing box assemblies by a
partnership of six companies partly funded under the UK
government's civil aviation research and demonstration
(CARAD) programme. The cell has shown the feasibility of
assembling the three principle components of a wing box
automatically using robotic technology. It includes
handling 6m high ribs and placing them between the
leading and trailing edge spars and skin wrapping and
fastening. Two robot systems were developed for external
and internal work, employing a combination of standard
robot arms and specials fitted with vision sensing and
drilling and fastening tooling. Software tools were used to
plan, simulate and programme the cell and also to
develop a full scaled-up version of the cell for studying
the potential of the systems employed for future
applications in production.
Electronic access
The research register for this journal is available at
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
http://www.emerald-library.com/ft
Feature
297
Industrial Robot: An International Journal
Volume 28 . Number 4 . 2001 . pp. 297±301
# MCB University Press . ISSN 0143-991X
The wing of a modern aircraft is made up of
the main central wing box plus the leading
and trailing edges (Figure 1). The completed
wing box of an Airbus is a massive structure,
measuring up to 32m long 6 7.5m wide and
1.6m deep for the very long range A340-500/
600 (Plate 1), which is claimed to have the
world's largest aircraft wings ± the wing box of
the A380 with a 36m span will be even larger.
A wing box is made up of three major
components; the ribs (up to 41), the
longitudinal spars (between four and seven)
and the skin panels (up to four on the top and
four on the bottom), which are strengthened
with rows of stringers attached by thousands
of rivets and bolts.
Automatic riveting
Over £400 million has been invested in wing
box production at Broughton over the past
four years. This includes £21 million on an
Ingersoll spar milling machine, the only one
of its type in the world, £6.6 million on a
41m long 6 3.2m wide skin mill for
machining A340-500/600 panels, and £21
million on two low voltage electromagnetic
riveting machines (LVER), also for the A340
range. The latter automatically drills the holes
and inserts the fasteners to attach stringers to
the skin panels in a continuous operation ±
approximately 65,500 rivets and 32,000 bolts
are used in assembling one A340-500/600
wing skin.
The wing box is built up in the assembly jigs
(Plate 2) where the ribs and spars are loaded
in a set sequence. The skin assemblies are
then progressively located and drilled before
being bolted to the supporting ribs and spars.
Currently, this is a labour-intensive process
using manual drilling and fastening methods
with dedicated jigs and fixtures. Ideally, much
of this process should be carried out
automatically, but presents many difficulties,
not least the sheer physical size of the
components involved and the accuracies of
alignment needed. It was to study potential
solutions to these and other problems that
Airbus UK initiated the AWBA research
project.
AWBA has been carried out in two phases,
each of two years' duration: the £2 million
AWBA 1 completed in 1997; and the recently
concluded AWBA 11, which had a £5 million
Figure 1 Construction of a typical wing build
Plate 1 The very long range Airbus A340/600 that has the world's largest
wings, which are built at Airbus UK's Broughton plant
Plate 2 Current method of building a wing box of an A340/600 in an
assembly jig
298
Automatic wing box assembly developments
Brian Rooks
Industrial Robot: An International Journal
Volume 28 . Number 4 . 2001 . 297±301
budget. Both phases were 50 percent funded
by the DTI under the CARAD programme.
The first phase was to identify and acquire
specific technologies for automated assembly
of large wings while the prime objective of
AWBA 11 was to demonstrate flexible
manufacture within a single automated
assembly cell at the same time as securing
further enabling technologies and identifying
technology gaps.
Both phases involved several partners. In
phase two, these were AEA Technology
(robotic fastening process control),
automated handling and positioning systems
(AMTRI), BAE Systems Advanced
Technology Centre (ATC) ± Sowerby (vision
and sensor automated positioning systems),
Leica (measuring systems), RTS Advanced
Robotics (robotic technologies) and
Tecnomatix (software and simulation) as well
Airbus UK who project managed the
programme and provided the facilities and
materials.
AWBA demonstrator
Set up in a converted hangar alongside the
main Broughton wing production facility, the
8.5m high AWBA 11 cell demonstrator (Plate
3) is able to build a four-rib wing box section
for Airbus' largest aircraft, the A380, with the
minimum of manual intervention. It
undertakes all the elements needed in the
assembly from the precise handling and
positioning of the 6m high ribs to drilling and
fastening the skins to the ribs. However, it is
not a production cell and cannot build a
complete full-length wing box.
The cell is of a gantry construction that
allows the wing box to be assembled with the
rib vertical, the concept for which was
developed by AMTRI. The upper raft fixed
below the gantry cross member holds the
tooling for the leading edge spar, while tooling
to locate the trailing edge spar is mounted on
the lower raft close to floor level. With the two
spars in position, the first operation is to place
the ribs between the two spars, for which
AMTRI developed the rib carrier robot.
The two spars have a series of pockets to
accept the ribs and the robot has to
manipulate a rib into these two sets of
pockets. To accomplish this, the rail mounted
rib carrier robot has a pivoting axis in addition
to three linear XYZ axes. The sequence is to
take a rib from the store, tilt it at
approximately 458 to the vertical using the
pivot axis, move it into position so that the
bottom edge of the rib locates into the lower
(trailing edge) spar and then bring the rib to
the vertical so that the upper edge locates into
the upper (leading edge) spar. The rib is then
clamped hydraulically.
Locating the rib into the spars requires the
robot to position to an accuracy of ‹0.5mm,
which for such a large structure is precise.
This is accomplished with the aid of the Leica
laser tracker system, which measures the
position, in this case, of the upper and lower
spar tooling and communicates any off-sets to
the robot. The Leica system is used in
industry, particularly in aerospace and
automotive industries, for large-scale, 3D
metrology, and is capable of measuring to
accuracies of ‹0.05mm over distances of up
to 35m. The unit's motorised head directs the
laser beam over a 3D volume up to 70m
diameter to locate and measure the 3D coordinates
of target reflectors placed at the
measurement positions. In the case of the
AWBA demonstrator, the transmitting unit is
located on one of the gantry legs but it is also
portable.
Skin wrapping
After fixing a set of ribs in position, the next
operation is skin wrapping, which was also the
responsibility of AMTRI. Skins are taken
from the store and simultaneously placed
against pads on both sides of the ribs either
Plate 3 The gantry-style AWBA 11 demonstrator set up in a hangar
alongside Airbus UK's wing manufacturing facility at Broughton
299
Automatic wing box assembly developments
Brian Rooks
Industrial Robot: An International Journal
Volume 28 . Number 4 . 2001 . 297±301
two or four at a time and then clamped by a
series of programmable pneumatic clamps.
Working from both sides balances the load
when the clamps are applied and avoids
having to construct a highly stiff supporting
structure. The skin sets cover the trailing
(lower) and leading (upper) part of the wing
box, leaving the centre section open to allow
access for internal fastening, and in
production for manual assembly and
inspection.
Fastening of the skins to the ribs in the
demonstrator involves both external (to the
wing box) and internal operations, for which
two separate robot systems were developed.
The external work of drilling the hole and
inserting the fastener is done with a standard
Kuka K350 six-axis robot rail mounted
(seventh axis) and equipped with a
sophisticated end-effector developed by BAE
Systems ATC. The end-effector incorporates
a vision sensor, high-speed spindle drilling
head and stud inserter (Plate 4).
Before skin wrapping takes place, the robot
uses the vision sensor, which consists of two
cameras and four laser ranger finders, to
locate the 3D position of each pad on the rib.
This is memorised so that after the skin has
been placed the Kuka robot knows exactly
where to drill through the skin and the pad in
one operation. Each hole four per pad is
drilled and deburred and then a stud inserted
in a cycle time of 15 seconds per hole. During
these operations the robot's six axes are
locked in position; in effect the robot is merely
an ``end-effector positioner''. Responsibility
for the drilling technology for these operations
rested with AEA technology. It undertook
tests to establish the optimum drilling
parameters and cutting conditions to ensure
maximum hole quality and minimum burr
size. It also carried out modal analysis and
vibration trials on the robot to study the effect
of these factors on hole accuracy when drilling
automatically.
Swaging of the fastening collar to the stud
inserted during the latter operation is done by
the internal robot, which was developed by
RTS Advanced Robotics (formerly UK
Robotics). Because of the restricted opening
into the wing box ± approximately 1 6 1.5m
± and the 5.5m reach to access the back of the
fastener through the far side skin, RTS could
not apply a standard, off-the-shelf robot and
had to develop a ``special''.
Deployment robot
The finished device is a 10 degrees-of-freedom
robot with a reach of 6.5m. It is made up of the
deployment robot, a telescopic boom that
swivels about a horizontal axis and is mounted
on a linear track to allow access to the full
length of the wing box, and a standard Fanuc
six-axis parallel leg robot. The latter is fitted to
the end of the boom arm and basically acts as
its end effector. The ultimate tooling
consisting of the swaging unit with collar feed
and stereoscopic vision sensor (developed by
BAE Systems ATC) is mounted on the end of
the legged robot. The sensor guides the robot
to find the stud end so that the tooling may
dock with the stud. The collar then slides over
the stud and is pulled tight before it is swaged
onto the stud.
The internal robot is designed to behave
like any other industrial robot, with the
exception that positioning for set-up and
programming is done by a teleoperator-type
strategy. This is to avoid placing an operator
or programmer in a potentially unsafe
position within the confines of a wing box and
also to overcome the problem of a large and
heavy robot arm in a remote position. Using
the teleoperator system, the end effector is
positioned remotely using television cameras
that form part of the tooling, to observe
movement. As a further safety measure, the
Plate 4 External robot consisting of Kuka industrial robot equipped with
special tooling for locating rib pads, drilling and stud insertion
300
Automatic wing box assembly developments
Brian Rooks
Industrial Robot: An International Journal
Volume 28 . Number 4 . 2001 . 297±301
robot arm is fitted with capacitance sensors
to detect the onset of a collision, whether
during teleoperational set-up or automatic
operation.
Throughout the second phase of the AWBA
project, extensive use has been made of
software planning and simulation tools, for
which Tecnomatix provided the solutions
with its eMPower software products. RTS
Advanced Robotics used these robotic
simulation and off-line programming tools
routinely for design of the internal robot, and
BAE Systems ATC used them in the design of
the external drilling and fastening robot. The
whole cell was simulated in 3D to help the
partners understand the interactions of the
various sub-systems and to provide a visual
tool for developing the optimum sequence of
operations. It was also useful in supporting
line-of-light studies during development of
the laser tracking measurement system.
At the later stages of the project a final
model of the whole cell was produced that
enabled the cell's entire build process to be
viewed in 15 minutes, which in ``real life''
would have taken one-and-a-half days.
Subsequently, the simulation model was
scaled-up to the assembly of a full production
wing box, allowing its physical feasibility to be
assessed, the operational sequences and cycle
times to be established and the likely cost of a
full-scale production facility to be estimated.
Airbus UK states that the test work carried
out in the cell has met all expectations and has
already proved the concept of automatic wing
skin panel wrapping. It is capable of handling
and positioning a 6m high wing rib quickly
and safely. It will continue to use the cell to
assess the ``scale-up'' implications as well as
the impact of the automatic methods on
aerodynamics and systems and on health and
safety. However, no decision has been made
on which technologies used in the
demonstrator will be implemented into fullscale
production, nor have any time scales
been laid down.
301
Automatic wing box assembly developments
Brian Rooks
Industrial Robot: An International Journal
Volume 28 . Number 4 . 2001 . 297±301

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