Intelligent Surface-normal Adjustment System and Application in Aeronautical Drilling Robot

Aeronautical drilling robot has been widely adopted in aircraft manufacturing with its high efficiency and reliability. Automatic drilling, however, requires the drill bit to be perpendicular to the curved surface of fuselage. In this paper, we present an intelligent surface-normal adjustment system to deal with the problem. This system calculates surface-normal vector by obtaining three measurement positions with laser range sensors and provides correction values to an innovative binary angular adjustment mechanism to regulate the feed direction of the drilling bit in real-time. We carried out a number of experiments on the aeronautical drilling robot. The experimental results demonstrate that this system can decrease the surface-normal error to less than ±0.5° and well meet the demand of modern aircraft manufacturing.