Flexible Robotic Machining in High Accuracy Applications (FRoMHAA)

英国航空航天业在欧洲排名第一，在全球市场上仅次于美国。随着航空旅行的扩大和下一代飞机的推出，未来20年全球市场预计将超过5万亿美元。然而，市场竞争非常激烈，英国的竞争地位受到威胁。为了抵御来自其他国家的竞争，英国需要提高生产率，增加产量，降低制造成本。自动化对于提高生产率和降低成本至关重要，但在航空航天领域，机器人有限的准确性和稳定性阻碍了自动化。该项目将解决这些限制，并使更高精度的航空航天制造任务实现自动化。该项目将为英国提供世界上最精确的大体积信封机器人。位于罗瑟勒姆的谢菲尔德大学先进制造研究中心（AMRC）的机器人将成为工厂2050的核心，该工厂将于2016年初开业，这将是英国第一家可重构组装和组件制造工厂，该工厂将开发和展示将被纳入未来工厂的技术和系统。自动化将导致更低的资本投资要求和更小的基础设施，生产出质量更好、公差更严格的飞机，正如在大规模生产的汽车行业所看到的那样。通过降低生产成本和提高制造机器人的效率，在欧洲生产产品可以变得更有利可图，这将鼓励航空航天制造商将更多的就业机会从海外带回英国。研究表明，从长远来看，自动化可以使英国的就业人数增加7%。

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.