The ever-growing need to improve manufacturing processes has led recently to an increase in the number of automation solutions used to assemble aircraft structural elements. A process of interest to this industry is the alignment of fuselage sections, which is currently done either manually or by complex, expensive automated systems. The manual method introduces a significant production delay and most automated systems have limited flexibility. This article presents an integration solution implemented in an alternative low-cost, high-flexibility alignment robotic cell. The performance of an optical coordinate measuring machine (CMM) as feedback source for the adaptive control of a conventional industrial manipulator is assessed. Laser interferometry readings are used as reference. The contribution of the work lies in the execution of experiments based on the EN ISO 9283 standard (Manipulating industrial robots - performance criteria and related test methods) to determine the adequacy of the commercial off-the-shelf system to the tolerances and requirements of the fuselage alignment process at hand. The optimal configuration of the integrated system attained the nominal alignment position with an average accuracy of 0.16mm and $0.004^\circ$ , partially meeting the required tolerances, and the obtained values are nearly 16x better compared to a baseline, open-loop manipulator. These results serve as reference for the aerospace industry in the development of the next generation of tools and automated assembly processes.

中文翻译：

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飞机机身装配的轻型自动化

对改进制造工艺的日益增长的需求最近导致用于组装飞机结构元件的自动化解决方案的数量增加。这个行业感兴趣的一个过程是机身部分的对齐，目前要么手动完成，要么通过复杂、昂贵的自动化系统完成。手动方法引入了显着的生产延迟，并且大多数自动化系统的灵活性有限。本文介绍了在另一种低成本、高灵活性对齐机器人单元中实现的集成解决方案。评估了光学坐标测量机 (CMM) 作为传统工业机械手自适应控制反馈源的性能。激光干涉测量读数用作参考。这项工作的贡献在于执行基于 EN ISO 9283 标准（操纵工业机器人 - 性能标准和相关测试方法）的实验，以确定商用现成系统对公差和要求的充分性。机身对准过程在手。集成系统的优化配置达到了标称对准位置，平均精度为 0.16mm，$0.004^\circ$，部分满足所需的公差，与基线开环机械手相比，获得的值提高了近 16 倍。这些结果可为航空航天工业开发下一代工具和自动化装配工艺提供参考。