The MEGAROB project will be more precisely dedicated to the manufacturing of large components such as airplanes and container-ships body parts or generator blades and masts for wind mills.
The main problems encountered when manufacturing large components are related to:
1) The difficulty to maintain a high level of accuracy
The need to move the parts from one site of the factory to the other in order to realise the different manufacturing operations
2) The necessity to realise at least part of the manufacturing operations manually
3) Ultimately, these drawbacks have a negative impact on the competitiveness of the industry because of the increased processing time and the necessary investments in manufacturing equipments.
The development proposed within MEGAROB consists in developing a platform for the realization of such operations automatically with a high accuracy rate in positioning of ±0.216mm+0.5μm/m. This supposes a tolerance of ±0.4mm in a 100 meters long part. The targeted system will be composed of a spherical robot, mounted on a conventional simple structure, such as a crane. This robot can cover a very large area, thanks to the capacity of the overhead crane.
The main problem to overcome for such a system is to work accurately enough to fulfil the requirements of the products to be manufactured.