Design and Realization of Robotic Automatic Drilling & Riveting Controlling System for Single-Sided Fasteners

This paper presents a robotic automatic drilling and riveting system for single-sided fasteners composed of a robot, an end effector including an intelligent camera and normal measurement cells, a rivet feeder, and some auxiliary system. The control system is designed with the functions of normal adjustment, drilling and riveting position adjustment, compaction, drilling, rivets feeding, glue spread, workstation conversion, and riveting. In order to meet the design needs, communication networks including EtherCAT bus, TCP/IP, serial communication, Automation Device Specification (ADS) communication, and digital IO communication are implemented. The laser sensors and intelligent camera assist to realize algorithms of the normal adjustment and the drilling and riveting positioning. The drilling and riveting system is verified by experiments of flat plate and curved surface. At last, a conclusion is made based on the experiment results which show drilling accuracy the maxi-mum aperture accuracy is 0.016 mm, the maximum deviation of dimple depth is 0.025 mm and the maximum deviation of normal is 0.151°. Aperture accuracy can reach H9 and the efficiency of drilling and riveting in this system can be 5/min.