Automated Grinding for Surface Defect Removal on Aircraft Components

Abstract:
Aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) processes include manual grinding of defects on complex surfaces, with the removal depth being critical for component re-use. The defect depth is not determined prior, resulting in a careful, time-consuming and tedious manual grinding task and limited productivity. In this paper, a robotic system for automated defect removal is proposed to face challenges of individual path planning, comply to removal specifications and detect defect removal endpoint. The system is demonstrated, first results for machining on a cylindrical surface are presented and analyzed before future work including optimizations are discussed.