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With an increased use of composite materials within the aerospace industry follows a need for rational and cost-effective methods for composite manufacturing. Manual operations are still common for low to medium manufacturing volumes and complex products. Manual operations can for example be found in material handling, when picking prepreg plies from a cutter table and stacking them to form a plane laminate in preparation for a subsequent forming operation. Stacking operations of this kind often involves a great number of different ply geometries and removal of backing paper and other protecting materials like plastic. In this paper two different demonstrator cells for automated picking of prepreg plies and stacking of plane laminates are presented. One demonstrator is utilizing a standard industrial robot and an advanced end-effector to handle the ply variants. The other demonstrator is using a dual arm robot which allow for simpler end-effector design.

Automated solutions for manufacturing composite products based on prepreg often imply Automatic Fiber Placement or Automatic Tape Laying. These systems are generally associated with huge investments. For certain manufacturing applications it is interesting to investigate alternatives to find simpler and less costly automation. One example of an automated system could be the use of a standard industrial robot to pick single prepreg plies from an automated cutting machine and stack them to form a plane laminate. This paper is based on a case illustrating a product from the aircraft manufacturing industry. The case will demonstrate a pick and place concept on a general level and illustrate challenges that must be solved. The challenge selected to be the main focus for this paper is an automated process for backing paper removal. A literature review of different gripping technologies reveals several interesting technologies, and the most promising are tested for backing paper removal.