Multi-Surface Admittance Control Approach applied on Robotic Assembly of Large-Scale parts in Aerospace Manufacturing

The robotization of assembly operations is one of the requests of aircraft manufacturers. During the assembly of large-scale sub-assemblies, contact forces between parts must be controlled. Exceeding some limits can damage the aircraft parts. This can happen because of the poor accuracy of industrial robots and uncertainties of parts' positions, and orientations. This paper proposes a new approach to control the movement of the robot end-effector, taking into account the contact forces between the parts during assembly. The suggested approach can be used to assemble complex shape and large-scale parts. Based on the admittance control, the proposed approach is used to ensure multi-surface contact. It allows to control the interaction forces at each contact surface. Each contact is modeled by a mass-spring-damper system. This approach was tested on the assembly of two large-scale airplane's parts using a KUKA robot (KR340), equipped with a Force/Torque (F/T) sensor. The performance of this multi-surface approach was compared to one surface admittance control.