Flexible Robotic Machining in High Accuracy Applications (FRoMHAA)

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The UK aerospace sector is number one in Europe and second only to the USA in the global market. That global market is expected to exceed $5 trillion over the next 20 years, with the expansion of air travel and the introduction of next generation aircraft. However, the market is extremely competitive and the UK’s competitive position is under threat. In order to fight off competition from other countries, the UK needs to increase productivity, ramp up production, and reduce the cost of manufacture. Automation is essential to enable those gains in productivity and reduction in costs but, in the aerospace sector, automation is held back by robots’ limited accuracy and stability. This project will address those limitations and enable more high accuracy aerospace manufacturing tasks to be automated. The project will give the UK the most accurate large volume envelope robot in the world. Based at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), in Rotherham, the robot will be at the heart of Factory 2050, opening in early 2016, which will the UK’s first reconfigurable assembly and component manufacturing factory, which will develop and showcase the technologies and systems that will be incorporated within the factories of the future. Automation will lead to lower capital investment requirements and smaller infrastructure, producing better quality aircraft with tighter tolerances as has been seen in the mass-produced automotive sector. By lowering production costs and increasing the efficiency of manufacturing robots, it can become more profitable to produce goods within Europe, which will encourage aerospace manufacturers to bring more jobs back to the UK from overseas. Studies have shown that in the long term automation could grow employment by 7% in the UK.