The deburring of industrial aerospace components using intelligent sensor data processing and computer vision as well as adaptive and AI-based process planning using industrial robots in a high-mix, low-volume environment

Initial Situation:

A burr is a piece of material or unwanted manufacturing residue firmly attached to a workpiece, giving its outer edges an imperfect geometric shape. Deburring describes the process of removing these firmly attached manufacturing residues. Deburring is particularly indispensable when manufacturing safety-critical components. It is, however, important to keep deburring costs as low as possible.
This is one of the reasons why robots are currently rarely used to deburr components, especially during small-scale production runs and when manufacturing different versions of a component. Furthermore, path planning is often time-consuming and complex and needs to be manually optimised, which can make intuitive and efficient robot programming a challenge.

Goals:

The overall objective of this partner project is to develop a robot cell design for centralised deburring in the high-mix, low-volume environment specific to the aerospace industry, and to implement it in the form of the ONE-CLICK ROBI demonstrator. This is intended to minimise the non-recurring costs (NRC) incurred during preparatory work. The development project also aims to help improve the process capability of industrial robots, so they can cope with sophisticated manufacturing tasks for the aerospace industry.

Process:

The research and development project is divided into six large work packages. Each consortium partner is responsible for overseeing one or more of these packages. toolcraft is focusing on the entire development chain of the ONE-CLICK ROBI demonstrator, from planning and technical implementation all the way through to commissioning. This involves digitally connecting all the subsystems with the innovations developed by the research institutes to create an end-to-end system solution, as well as information modelling in the form of a digital twin and the development of an interface for human-AI interaction.