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This paper presents an innovative solution of portable drilling machine, lightweight and low cost, dedicated to drilling operations on single and double curved aircraft structure. Aircraft Standard drilling process mainly uses drilling templates combined with Automated Drilling Units (ADU) which is a very efficient solution. However, the management of templates and ADUs is a time consuming and costly task in regards to the large quantity of existing references spread over every aircraft production sites. Therefore, to help reducing those costs and also workload, the concept of the Numerical Template (NCT) has been designed, using classic and robust mechanical devices, hand-held, lightweight and universal. NCT architecture concept could led to a family of NCT with different dimensions of frame parts(X,Y,Z), fitted to the targeted area geometry. The system is able to guaranty an accuracy of ± 0.5 mm and a normality of ±0.5°.

This paper presents an innovative, compact, autonomous and accurate solution for swaging aeronautical LGP collars on robots. Its rigid structure allows the application of clamping force that enables one-way assembly of aeronautical structures. Equipped with an advanced vision system combined with a multi-degree of freedom swaging nose, it is able to compensate robot absolute inaccuracy while the robot is clamped (2 mm positioning error between the two robots can therefore be compensated automatically). This concept used in a face to face configuration of two robots, has the advantage of not requiring perfect alignment of the 2 robots between them; only the drilling external robot must be precisely positioned in relative with the parts to assemble. With a form factor of 400×200×200 mm3 this innovative end-tool offers a great compacity that allows it to easily access to difficult internal areas such as cockpits interiors.