Secure Collaborative Robotics (Cross-sectorial UC)

The involvement of collaborative robots, a more experimental use case, aims at reducing the share of manual activities of lower added value which at state of the art constitute 70% of manufacturing tasks still in the Aerospace domain, a little less in the Automotive and Maritime domains. Expected benefits of this industrial use case as a whole are: lead time reduction, waste reduction, and shop floor logistics cost reduction.

The key challenge here is to secure the collaboration between humans and robots which should operate in non-segregated shop-floor spaces. Indeed, unlike other industries, Aerospace manufacturing suffers constraints which do no enable to automate the whole process, most critical actions being performed from inside out of the aircraft body. The precision required by certain operations remains also yet out of reach of state-of-the-art robots.

Beyond that, the average batch sizes, in particular when it comes to military aircraft production, are too small to make pre-programmed robotics a valid option economically speaking. For this reason, it is to be expected that humans will make the largest share of operation in aircraft manufacturing for many years.

Still, some activities of lower added value could be automated, provided we come to a level of technology that enables robots:

• to progress in similar environments as humans (Aerospace shop floor can hardly be reconfigured)
• to interact and synchronize intelligently with humans (most lines have no fixed cadence and require the robot to operate without predefined schedule)
• to optimize routes and task allocation collectively (in the case were a complete fleet of robots would be used)
• to do all the above without putting the human operators’ safety or the production quality at risk.

With this perspective, SeCoIIA will fulfil an experiment aiming at validating safety and security functions of relatively common robots named AMRs (Autonomous Mobile Robot), usually involved in basic shop-floor logistic tasks, such as carrying tools or materials from one place to the other whenever needed