The Aircraft Directorate at the San Antonio Air Logistics Center (SA-ALC) is responsible for depot level maintenance on the C-5 airframe. The efficiency and productivity of many of the required repair processes will benefit from the insertion of telerobotics technologies. Small batch size, feature uncertainty, and varying workloads make hard automation impractical for a wide range of depot processes. The physical scale of the applications includes stripping paint from a C-5 heavy lifter to remanufacturing small individual parts. The parts generally arrive individually or in small batches and a wide variety of parts are remanufactured. Due to the wide variety and scale of the applications, the maintenance and remanufacturing is now done almost exclusively manually. Telerobotic supervised autonomy and shared control technologies provide intermediate solutions where the human and machine collaborate to perform tasks.
Example depot applications for which the architecture applies include: painting of the C-5A exterior in a dedicated hanger facility; painting of removed piece parts in a robotic workcell; stripping of paint from the C-5A exterior in a dedicated hanger facility; surface finishing in form of removing material from patches and polishing metal to a high gloss finish in a robotic workcell; surface cleaning of removed parts in a robotic workcell through application of bicarbonate of soda particulate stream; and sealing and desealing of aircraft fuel tanks.
The architecture is nominally separated into local and remote sites corresponding to the location of the operator and robotic systems, respectively. A task program is generated by the local site which describes the task to be executed either by an independent subsystem or through coordination of subsystems, each of which has a subsystem task program. The subsystem task programs are executed by a task program sequencer, possibly at the local site operator control station, or sent to the subsystem controller for execution within the subsystem controller, if possible.
More details can be found in
Paul G. Backes, Wayne Zimmerman and Michael B. Leahy, Jr. "A Telerobotics Architecture for Aircraft Maintenance and Remanufacturing." In Proceedings International Symposium on Robotics and Manufacturing, Maui, Hawaii, July, 1994
Point of Contact:
Paul G. Backes,
Mail Stop 198-219
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109
818-354-3850
Paul.G.Backes@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last updated: May 10, 1996