Relation between repeatability and speed of robot-based systems for composite aircraft production through multilateration sensor system

Fiber composites are becoming increasingly important in different fields of lightweight application. To guarantee the estimated demand of components made of carbon fiber reinforced plastics the use of industrial robots is suggested in production. High velocity of the layup process is addressed to significantly increase the production rate. Today, the layup of the fiber material is performed by gantry systems. They are heavy weight, slow and the variety of possible part shapes is limited. Articulated robots offer a huge operational area in relation to their construction size. Moreover, they are flexible enough to layup fiber material into different shaped molds. Thus, standard articulated robots are less accurate and more susceptible to vibration than gantry systems. Therefore, this paper illustrates an approach to classify volumetric errors to obtain a relation between the achievable speed in production and precision. The prediction of a precision at a defined speed is the result. Based on the measurement results the repeatability of the robotic unit within the workspace is calculated and presented. At the minimum speed that is applicable in production the repeatability is less than 30 mm. Subsequently, an online strategy for path error compensation is presented. The approach uses a multilateration system that consists of four laser tracer units and measures the current absolute position of a reflector mounted at the end-effector of the robot. By calculating the deviation between the planned and the actual position a compensated motion is applied. The paper concludes with a discussion for further investigations.