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The industry wide requirement of new highly flexible automated fastening systems in aircraft production has created the need for developing new fastening systems. This paper will focus on the development of the Frame Riveting Assembly Cell (FRAC) by BROETJE-Automation to meet this need. The new FRAC machine configuration is built for automated drilling and fastening of different aircraft type parts. It is highly flexible with a high speed positioning system mounted multifunction end effector. System travel is limited only by installed track length. The FRAC integrates well with conventional and reconfigurable automated fastening work holding tools.

Drilling of high-strength titan material and composites in combination creates complex challenges in order to achieve required productivity and quality. Long spiral chips are characteristically for the titan drilling process, which leads to e.g. chip accumulation, high thermomechanical load, surface damages and excessive tool wear. The basic approach is the substitution of today’s peck drilling as current solution to this problem and the implementation of a vibration assisted drilling, so called micro-peck-drilling-process, to generate a kinematic chip breakage in a significant more efficient way. To meet perfectly the requirements regarding rates, quality and automation level, Broetje-Automation as system integrator has investigated and developed the implementation of different alternative high-performance systems and methods to approach the optimal oscillation movement of the tool.

The demand of fulfilling continually increasing customer requirements forces suppliers to always improve their system solutions to be state of the art. The subject Project Management Approach explains the planning and realization of complete Integrated Assembly Lines for Aircraft structural parts and components. The paper will describe and focus on the main aspects of the state of the art technology in automated fastening, drilling and assembly processes to meet the required customer production and reporting criteria. Furthermore the paper will present existing production examples in support of the established project management process.

Ever increasing process applications inspire us to design innovative and modular manufacturing cells in compliance with modern specifications. The result is the new highly flexible Aerospace application specific robot introduced as the “POWER RACe”. This paper describes how benchmarks for flexible automated drilling and fastening are being achieved with the Power RACe technology platform.