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Aernnova experience on automatic drilling operations started in 1,999. The company signed a new contract with Embraer, to design, manufacture and assembly several structures of the model 170. It was big news for the company. But after that minute of pride, manufacturing engineering people of the company started to think about the process to assemble those big panels of the Horizontal Stabilizer, Vertical Stabilizer and Rear Fuselages in the best Quality and Cost. There were a lot of rows of rivets to install. Some ideas arisen, but the final decision was to forget the available processes at that time and think about to automate the drilling, countersink and riveting of the stringers, doublers and window frames to the panels. There were a lot of doubts, figures to do and obstacles, but the company took the decision of going ahead with that process. That step changed the state of the art at that time in the company.

The aim of this paper is to present a robust and low-cost automatic system for drilling aluminum stacks, as well as an integral methodology for the design of tool trajectories and the control of the drilling process itself. The proposed system employs a high accuracy robotic arm, a commercial spindle head and a specially developed SCADA, which enables it to load tool trajectories designed by using any software application. Furthermore, this SCADA is useful to monitor the main parameters of the drilling process for anticipating problems related to the unexpected tool wear or for a quick response in case of tool collision. A special jig for positioning the stack to be drilled is designed to increase the robot accessibility. In this work, tests are performed for optimizing the cutting parameters of the robotic system in order to maximize the accuracy and the surface finishing of the holes.