Collision-free path planning of industrial cooperating robots for aircraft fuselage production

Due to rising energy costs aircraft should have a lower kerosine consumption. To achieve this aircraft manufacturers increase the usage of high performance, lightweight materials such as carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP). At the moment production needs a lot of manual steps. However the airplane structures to be built e.g. a fuselage, are up to 30m long. It is strongly recommended to automate these processes. To build these parts automatically the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has developed and built a large (30m × 15m × 7 m) robotic facility where multiple robots which move on linear axes share the same workspace. The sharing is important because the production process requires that the robots cooperate. Intelligent methods are necessary to generate collision-free paths for these robots.