月份：2022年5月

The aviation industry is no stranger to automation. The first “gyroscopic automatic pilot” dates back to the earliest days of powered flight. In this century, automation has all but completely transformed the nature of aircraft manufacturing. 

In the maintenance hangar, essential safety procedures traditionally relied on the “keen, experienced eyes” of human maintenance personnel. Now, however, automation is gaining ground there as well.  

One specific aspect of aircraft maintenance has always posed challenges for human health and safety: the depainting of airplanes. According to Boeing, planes need to have their coatings of paint removed about every five years. Aircraft are painted to prevent corrosion as well as for aesthetic purposes, but periodically, it is important to inspect the plane’s bare surface.  

However, aerospace paint typically contains hexavalent chromium. This compound helps to create certain colors and aids in reducing corrosion, but it is also associated with serious health risks. According to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), exposure to hexavalent chromium “can cause severe health effects to workers, including lung cancer.”

This threat has made depainting both dangerous and costly.  In the past, every time human workers blasted the paint off an F-16 with hoses spraying plastic beads, the process created no less than a full ton of hazardous waste.  

Robotics to the Rescue

With the advent of a new laser-based depainting system from Titan Robotics, it is now possible to execute this essential work with far less risk to human workers.

Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Titan is a spinout from the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).  Founded by CMU faculty in 2014, its new approach to aircraft surface processing reflects the success of NREC research funded by the U.S. Air Force.  

Laser ablation removes paint from airplanes by “exciting” and vaporizing the molecules.  By comparison to blasting or chemical removal methods, this process reduces the production of hazardous waste by more than 90%. Furthermore, Titan’s strong focus on software development has allowed it to develop a system in which robots operate the lasers, keeping humans out of harm’s way. 

“We add more complexity and software control on to typical development of automated solutions,’’ noted Alex Klinger, a program engineer at Titan. “With our software, the robots figure out where the plane is, how much paint is on the plane, what type of paint and how to burn the paint off.”  

Precision, Mobility, and Safety

To create a 3D map of the surface to be depainted, Titan’s robots use LiDAR (“light detection and ranging”), a sensor technology widely used in autonomous vehicles.  In two-robot full aircraft systems, the robots are mounted on mobile bases which allow them to drive themselves around the aircraft.  For work on off-aircraft components, rail-based systems allow the robots to reach very long parts of the aircraft.  Titan can also design systems in which the robots are fixed in position.  

While the robots use continuous wave lasers to remove the paint, humans monitor the process from a control room, where they are protected from exposure. 

“It’s really about safety,’’ Klinger said. “They’re really just being the supervisor of the system, making sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.”

Another critical requirement is the need to maintain the structural integrity of the plane.  Damage to the surface of a $130 million fighter jet would be no small matter from a cost point of view.  But there is the ultimate priority of flight safety to consider as well.  

“There is a tremendous amount of rigor on our side for our control systems and our robotics in making sure that we’re not hitting the aircraft and making sure that our laser processes are not damaging the aircraft,’’ Klinger said. 

Connection with Confidence

To guide and protect the power supply and other essential connections such as laser fibers, Titan’s design required specially engineered cable carriers.  Manufactured by igus, the triflex system can hold up to 16 cables at a time. One important advantage of triflex is its capacity to handle the weight and protect the cables.

“The weight and the volume are substantial,’’ Klinger said. “I think it’s 12-to-16 distinct cables and they can be held very nicely.” 

The other advantage of triflex is the range of motion. “It can hold the cables, but it also has a three-degree freedom of movement,’’ Klinger noted. “A lot of cable chains move in a two-dimensional space, not a three-dimensional space. When you get to complex motions, where a robot is working in three-dimensional space, we need a flexible link that can contain the cables while the robot operates with six degrees of freedom. Triflex can do that.”

Multi-axis cable carriers such as triflex are used in welding, packaging, material handling and automotive applications. A built-in torsion stop reduces mechanical stress on cables, and a defined bend radius ensures the bend radius of cables is not violated. 

Klinger noted, “For us, it’s all about having confidence in those cables. We know the product will contain them, will limit how they bend, and it will hold them exactly where we want them to for the entire time.”   

New Horizons

The sensing and control methodologies of Titan’s systems have many other potential applications, with the robots deploying different tools.  “The robotics are the same, the software is the same,’’ Klinger noted. The cable carriers provided by igus can also solve the same problem in other systems. Regardless of the specific context, it is all about delivering utilities to the point of use. It’s important that we know where those cables are, know that they are protected and not worry about them getting snagged.”

For now, however, Titan Robotics has made a meaningful contribution to the safety of aircraft maintenance personnel.  As summed up by Klinger, “you had the human factors of a person working in a terrible environment for a long period of time.’’  Now, with human oversight, robots are helping keep planes safe to fly with far less risk to crews on the ground.  

Katherine Bonamo and Thomas Renner write on engineering, construction and other trade industry topics for publications in the United States and Canada.

The post Advanced cable management lets robots depaint airplanes appeared first on The Robot Report.

AB Dynamics and NASCAR have partnered to perform crash-test of NASCAR’s Next Gen race car using AB Dynamics’ robots. The car was equipped with steering, shifting and pedal (throttle, brake and clutch) robots, as well as sensors and a crash test dummy. 

The plan for the test crash was to send the race car into a Steel and Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER) barrier at 130 mph. The car needed to hit the barrier precisely at an angle of 24 degrees.

“The challenge was trying to get this extremely complex machine to do a very precise test without a human driver piloting the car,” Craig Hoyt, AB Dynamics Business Development Manager, said. “AB Dynamics robots allowed NASCAR to use a fully running race car and conduct the test at a real race track at real race speeds. There is no better data than replicating crash tests in a real environment and our robots enable us to do that accurately and repeatedly.”

NASCAR used AB Dynamics’ SR60 for steering, CBAR600 for pedals and its Gearshift Robot to drive the car. The company’s path following software ensured the robot was able to steer the car into the SAFER barrier at exactly 130.015 mph and within one degree of the determined angle. The vehicle hit the barrier within 2 cm of the desired impact point. 

“This is a truly innovative way to test the safety of vehicles in motorsport. The data we obtained from the test was extremely important and was not possible to get from any crash test facilities at the time,” John Patalak, the managing director of safety engineering at NASCAR, said. “The test provided valuable information for correlation with our computer crash simulations and confirmed that the predicted vehicle impact performance from the simulation was duplicated in this real-world crash test.”

AB Dynamics was founded in 1982 as a vehicle engineering consultancy. The company offers automotive test systems for a variety of applications, including highly-efficient durability testing to precision control for new areas of technology development. 

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A trio of researchers at City University of Hong Kong has developed a tiny drone based on the maple seed pod. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Songnan Bai, Qingning He and Pakpong Chirarattananon, describe how they used the maple seed pod as an inspiration for increasing flight time in under 100-gram drones.

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Oxford, and the Tencent Robotics X Lab have recently introduced a configuration-aware policy for safely controlling mobile robotic arms. This policy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can help to better guide the movements of a robotic arm, while also reducing the risk that it will collide with objects and other obstacles in its vicinity.

Underwater environments can be particularly challenging for autonomous robots. Things are constantly moving and changing, and robots need to figure out where they are without relying on GPS data. 

Researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology have created a robot that is able to successfully navigate a crowded marina underwater. The robot is able to map its environment, track its own location and plan a safe route through a complex environment in real-time, simultaneously.

“Underwater mapping in an obstacle-filled environment is a very hard problem, because you don’t have the same situational awareness as with a flying or ground-based robot — and that makes sending a robot underwater an inherently risky process,” said Brendan Englot, project lead and interim director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The team was able to develop an algorithm that allowed the robot to monitor and manage its level of uncertainty about its location and environment, and make real-time decisions based on that uncertainty. The robot uses active SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) algorithms.

“Essentially, the robot knows what it doesn’t know, which lets it make smarter decisions,” Englot said. “By creating a virtual map that accounts for the robot’s own confidence about where it is and what it’s seeing, the robot can quickly, safely, and accurately map a new environment.”

The robot, a customized BlueROV2 robot, operates at a depth of 1 meter, and uses sonar signals to detect objects around it. The robot was able to successfully explore a harbor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in King’s Point, New York.

The robot has many potential applications, including in harbor repairs, building and maintaining offshore wind farms, aquaculture projects and drilling rigs. Moving forward, Englot’s team plans to ruggedize robotics platform to allow for longer-lasting undersea missions.

The post Researchers developing underwater map-making robot appeared first on The Robot Report.

ABB launches a new Robotic Depalletizer solution designed for handling complex depalletizing tasks in the logistics, e-commerce, healthcare, and consumer packaged goods industries.

The solution combines an ABB industrial robotic arm with vision guidance and a new, custom gripper design. The solution is optimized for mixed load pallets with a variety of box sizes and types.

The vision system can quickly and easily identify a new box type and then adjust the grip location and gripper orientation to optimally pickup the box from the pallet. This shortens the setup time and minimizes the engineering effort to deploy a new depalletizing workcell.

“Changes in consumer behavior are leading to a rise in new sales channels such as omni-channel, direct to consumer (D2C) and e-commerce. These, in turn, are driving the need for more flexible and efficient order fulfillment and distribution infrastructures,” says Marc Segura, ABB’s Robotics Division President. “With the ability to depalletize boxes stacked in a variety of configurations from single and mixed pallets, ABB´s Robotic Depalletizer helps to meet this need, allowing faster and more accurate handling of a wide range of goods ready for the next stage in the distribution process.”

The robot can efficiently process pallets of up to 2.8m (9.2 ft) high and boxes up to 30 kg (80 lbs). The robot can work at speeds up to 650 cycle per hour, and do this 24 hours a day.

A variety of ABB robots can be deployed into the Robotic Depalletizer solution. This includes a range of four to six axis robots. This enables the solution to be appropriately size for the expected operations, and can make the solution more affordable if lighter payloads, or less complex pallet configurations are expected.

The Robotic Palletizer can place boxes to an out feed conveyor or it can even interact with an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) for removal of boxes. ABB recently acquired AMR provider ASTI and has integrated ASTI into its product line.

The post ABB depalletizer replaces heavy lifting and improves efficiency appeared first on The Robot Report.

The Bovay Civil Infrastructure Laboratory Complex, located in the basement of Thurston Hall, has a new tenant: a roughly 6,000-pound industrial robot capable of 3D printing the kind of large-scale structures that could potentially transform the construction industry, making it more efficient and sustainable by eliminating the waste of traditional material manufacturing.

A team of researchers led by University of Toronto Professor Tim Barfoot is using a new strategy that allows robots to avoid colliding with people by predicting the future locations of dynamic obstacles in their path.

An autonomous spacecraft exploring the far-flung regions of the universe descends through the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet. The vehicle, and the researchers who programmed it, don't know much about this environment.