Xaba and Lockheed Martin collaborate to test autonomous robots in airframe manufacturing
by CM Staff
Based on the data collected by the Lockheed Martin and Xaba teams, Xaba’s xCognition improved accuracy and consistency of the commercial robot by a factor of 10X.
TORONTO — Xaba, developers of an AI-driven robotics and CNC machine controller, and Lockheed Martin recently completed a collaboration to evaluate the automation of crucial manufacturing operations using the global aerospace company’s industrial robots integrated with Xaba’s proprietary physics-informed deep artificial neural network model, xCognition.
Xaba and Lockheed Martin identified a use case focused on a typical robotics work cell used in any aerospace factory to test how Xaba’s xCognition “synthetic brain” could empower a commercial robot with greater intelligence and understanding of its body and the task it is about to execute while ensuring required quality and tolerances are achieved.
The test consisted of two phases:
- Phase 1: Assessing the robot’s performance in maintaining accurate and consistent trajectory positioning with and without Xaba’s xCognition.
- Phase 2: Performing a set of drilling tests on an aluminum test plate with specified positional tolerances.
Based on the data collected by the Lockheed Martin and Xaba teams, Xaba’s xCognition improved accuracy and consistency of the commercial robot by a factor of 10X. This test shows how industrial robotics augmented with xCognition can perform crucial manufacturing operations that until now have been exclusively done by more expensive and less flexible CNC machines.
“The accuracy performance of a robotic system limits the type of process it can perform based on the cost efficiency of the accuracy hardware,” said Matthew Galla, Applications Engineer Staff for Lockheed Martin’s Aeronautics business. “The test with the xCognition controller allows us to rethink how we can accelerate innovation in manufacturing.”
Accurate drilling historically requires expensive (both in hardware and real-estate) static machine tools or the task is manually performed by skilled operators. Using industrial robots and collaborative robots (cobots) instead of the two options currently embraced by aerospace companies is appealing because they are much more flexible, adaptable, and less costly than CNC machine tools. However, commercial industrial robotics systems have struggled to perform critical manufacturing operations such as drilling, laser welding, light machining, and precise assembly. The reason for this is the lack of robotics intelligence required to deliver accuracy, repeatability, and to work in path programming mode rather than point-to-point. This challenge is reportedly addressed with the xCognition AI-driven control system.
