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The use of paint automation in commercial aircraft production is being studied to reduce process cycle times, provide a higher quality paint finish, lower emissions, and increase process consistency. The cost of new aircraft paint hangars and increasing production rates is driving a need for increased capacity in existing facilities by using new coatings and technology. Testing of robotic painting at Boeing has uncovered unique differences between aerospace and automotive applications. Paint cure times, number of paint colors, environment control, and part size considerations are some of the issues that make aerospace application of coatings more difficult than automotive applications. Understanding the unique factors involved in the robotic application of commercial aerospace coatings is important for future advancements in application technology, gains in aircraft paint hangar capacity, delivering quality coating finishes, and lowering environmental footprint.

Many machining and measurement operations require the part to be held in a fixture for a stable and repeatable process. Using fixtures that are specifically designed and built for a specific part becomes expensive when many different types of parts are to be processed. Flexible part fixtures are time consuming to set up and generally do not offer the part stability that larger parts often require. The current state of the art in flexible part fixtures for lightweight applications include expensive adjustable towers positioned manually by the operator or automatically by a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) to component fixtures consisting of v-blocks, c-clamps, double-sided tape, vacuum cups, and spacer blocks. Some fixtures are positioned in a grid pattern thus limiting the fixture placement to the spacing of the grid. Other systems require the fixture to be locked down to the machine base with a clamp but placement is only limited to the size of the fixture base.