Automatization of primary flight control actuators maintenance procedures using collaborative robotics

The Electro-Hydraulic Servo Actuator (EHSA) is a key technology used for primary flight control on aircrafts. If the development of an advanced diagnostic procedure to detect failures is of great interest to the aerospace industry, it is also fundamental to merge it with the new criteria of the so called Industry 4.0.This document, as the result of a nine months work at Lufthansa Technik (LHT) facilities in Hamburg, wants to be a guideline for using collaborative robots in the field of aircraft maintenance. The research, in fact, was mainly focused on understanding limits and potentialities of collaborative robotics and to develop a program for automatic robot adjustments on primary flight control servo-actuators. To achieve this goal, it has been necessary to develop a Modbus communication to interface the robot with LabVIEW and the measurement system IMC FAMOS for commanding the collaborative robot from an external computer. In so doing, it is possible to partially bypass the Universal Robots software, that limits the complexity of the program, and to have a more flexible one that can be used for different tasks. The main advantage of such an interface, however, is that the commands for each test can be built on a sequencer in LabVIEW and the robot software acts like the interpreter of the given commands. This offers Lufthansa Technik the flexibility to be able to control different robots of different brands with the same main LabVIEW program. This goal is reached by just programming the basic functions, such as movements and rotations, in the robot software while the core of the program is built on LabVIEW. This strategy makes the time required to program a new robot to be dramatically reduced.To conclude, all this is part of project that imagines a new automated test bench able to test different more units in parallel with a high flexibility in order to increase the productivity of the company and to build a "smart factory".