Abstract:
Aircraft manufacturers are experiencing a fierce competition worldwide.
Improving productivity, increasing throughput and reducing costs are
influencing aircraft manufacturer’s future development. In order to improve
competitiveness and provide sufficient and high quality products, it should
reduce operations of aircraft assembly,majority of which are still in manual
process, which limit production output. In contrast, these processes can be
automated to replace manual operations. Much more attention should be
placed on automated application.
This project aims to propose a methodology to develop the automated
assembly based on robotics and use this methodology to develop a new
concept of Automated Leading Edge Assembly. The research selects an
automated assembly process for further evaluation and brackets assembled
on the front spar of Leading Edge are chosen to be automated assembly with
robot assistant. The software DELMIA is used to develop and simulate the
automated assembly process of brackets based on 3-D virtual aircraft
Leading Edge models. The research development is mainly divided into three
phases which are: (1) The state of art on Manual Leading Edge Assembly; (2)
Automated Leading Edge Assembly framework development; (3) Automated
Leading Edge Assembly framework evaluation including automated assembly
process simulation based on DELMIA robotics workbench and automated
assembly cost estimation.
The research has proposed a methodology to develop the automated
assembly based on robotics, proposed a new concept of Automated Leading
Edge Assembly: using robots to replace workers to finish the assembly applications in the Leading Edge, and proposed a new automated bracket
assembly process with laser ablation, adhesive bonding, drilling, riveting, and
robot application. These applications can attract more and more engineers’
attention and provide preliminary knowledge for further study and detail
research in the future.
