Mobile manipulator is coming to aerospace manufacturing industry

Industrial robots, that are designed to carry out operations fast, repeatedly and accurately, usually have been fixed to one physical location and manipulate objects on the assembly line. However, for several industrial applications, particularly for the applications involving large part manufacturing such as aerospace industry or shipbuilding industry, large parts are worked on in a stationary production cell. In such a production environment, specialized, stationary robotic systems are not economical and a mobile manipulator is desirable. In this paper, we present the systematic architecture designed for a mobile manipulator working together with human co-workers in an unstructured environment. We detail hardware specification of robot as well as software architectures under consideration of safety, efficiency and load balance issues of industrial robotics, in particular for the aerospace manufacturing industry. A configurable graphical user interface has also been presented to test and validate our system design. Two commonly existing exemplary tasks in aerospace manufacturing industry - sealant applying and visual inspection, have been discussed within this systematic architecture.