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Building prototype aircrafts is costly in tooling especially since only one aircraft is being built. Today's most common tooling strategy is to weld together a beam framework. Welded framework solutions have long lead times both in design and manufacturing and once the aircraft is assembled the tool becomes obsolete. Flexible tooling strategy uses non-welded tooling thus it can be changed and re-used for future products. Early version of a new aircraft model is always hampered by frequent changes in its design, which is cumbersome to handle in a welded framework solution. This paper presents a flexible assembly tooling solutions based on Flexapods and BoxJoint. The Flexapods are commercialized reconfigurable tooling units that are manually adjusted injunction with a laser tracker to a final positional accuracy of +/? 0,05 mm absolute accuracy.

The ability to adapt to rapidly evolving market demands continues to be the one of the key challenges in the automation of assembly processes in the aerospace industry. To meet this challenge, industry and academia have made efforts to automate flexible fixturing. LOCOMACHS (Low Cost Manufacturing and Assembly of Composite and Hybrid Structures) - a European Union funded project with 31 partners - aims to address various aspects of aero-structure assembly with a special attention directed to the development of a new build philosophy along with relevant enabling technologies. This paper aims to present the results on the developed wing box build philosophy and the integration of automated flexible tooling solutions into the assembly process. The developed solution constitutes the use of synchronized hexapods for the assembly of front spar to upper cover whereas another hexapod was developed to install a rib by using of a force feedback sensor.

The increased diffusion of cooperation between humans and robotics in manufacturing systems is one of the next things to implement within robotics. Since the computer power gets more and more powerful, the possibilities increase to achieve safer working environment, due to that all safety signals demands fast management of data. This could lead to a possibility to work closer and more direct with a robot, using the robot as a third hand. Within an EU FW7 funded project called LOCOMACHs (Low Cost Manufacturing and Assembly of Composite and Hybrid Structures) there are one study focusing on how to support a future higher TRL-leveled HMI cell (Human Machine Interaction) in an assembly task. The main objective in this paper is to present how different external safety systems could support the whole HMI assembly cell to work properly in an industrial context.