Humanoid Robots in Aircraft Manufacturing: The Airbus Use Cases

TLDR

Recent developments in multicontact planning, bipedal walking, SLAM, whole‑body multisensory optimization, and contact detection suggest that humanoids could automate tasks in large‑scale manufacturing sites. The study investigates deploying humanoid robots in aircraft manufacturing assembly operations inaccessible to wheeled or rail‑ported robots, presenting results and recommendations. The authors integrated recent advances into the HRP‑4 and TORO humanoid platforms to enable aircraft manufacturing tasks. The integrated humanoid robots successfully performed a bracket‑assembly task on a full‑scale A350 fuselage mockup at Airbus Saint‑Nazaire.

Abstract

We report on the results of a collaborative project that investigated the deployment of humanoid robotic solutions in air-craft manufacturing for several assembly op erations where access by wheeled or railported robotic platforms is not possible. Recent de velopments in multicontact planning and control, bipedal walking, embedded simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), whole-body multisensory task-space optimization control, and contact detection and safety suggest that humanoids could be a plausible solution for automation, given the specific requirements in large-scale manufacturing sites. The main challenge is the integration of these scientific and technological advances into two existing humanoid platforms: the position-controlled Human Robotics Project (HRP-4) and the torque-controlled robot (TORO). This integration effort was demonstrated during a bracket-assembly operation inside a 1:1-scale A350 mockup of the front part of the fuselage at the Airbus Saint-Nazaire site. We present and discuss the main results achieved in this project and provide recommendations for future work.