For obvious reasons, parts manufacturing in the aerospace industry is subject to stringent quality requirements, which in most cases can only be met by having the manufacturing processes supervised by highly skilled and experienced workers.

This fact is particularly true for the welding due to its critical involvement in the whole manufacturing process.

Laser tracking makes automatic laser welding possible for aerospace parts

One of the biggest airliner engine manufacturer has implemented a robotic laser welding cell dedicated to the engine's exhaust casing manufacturing.

The challenge was to automatically and accurately detect the actual location of seams formed by the casing frame and each of its blades, in an extremely confined space.

Using this position information, the robot drives the welding laser beam perfectly aligned into the seam within the tolerance required by the process.

Robotic machining of holes on large aircraft parts

In order to optimize the machining of holes on large aircraft components, robotic systems, using 6-axis robots mounted on rails, are now used to perform these high precision tasks.

A Servo-Robot sensor mounted on the robot wrist is used to locate reference features incorporated on the aircraft part. This allows for the computation of the exact position of the part in space and the location of the holes to be drilled.

For each reference feature, the system measures its size, position, and full orientation and transfers the information to the robot where the computation of the position of each hole to be drilled is finalized.

Welding of aerospace components

Low volume and high precision requirements are the two major obstacles for automation in the aerospace industry.

These can now be easily overcome by the use of high precision tracking systems. Servo-Robot’s joint tracking systems mounted on an automatic TIG welding machine has permitted our customers in the aerospace industry to improve quality and productivity due.