The aircraft fuselage assembly process is too labor intensive and highly manual within the Brazilian aircraft industry. Foreign companies of this industrial segment started the adoption of automated solutions in the last two decades. Their automated solutions are very product dependent as well as very expensive. This kind of solution is inadequate for the Brazilian aircraft industry. This paper shows the preliminary results of a flexible, low cost automated system specially designed to fit the Brazilian requirements. This is based upon the usage of industrial robots for general purposes. In order to check the feasibility of such a solution, the process requirements are expressed in terms of accuracy, repeatability and resolution of the robots. These characteristics are measured by two independent, state-of-art measurement systems, namely, Indoor GPS and photogrammetry device. The initial results allow one to conclude that the robot can be used for the purpose described herein as long as it is assisted by correction process based upon the very measurement systems used to acquire its operational characteristics
High volume measurement systems; indoor GPS; photogrammetry devices; aircraft fuselage assembly; robotic assembly
