A Compensation Method for Enhancing Aviation Drilling Robot Accuracy Based on Co-Kriging

The positional error of aviation drilling robot has a great influence on the strength and lives of aircrafts in the aircraft assembly. In order to improve the position accuracy of aviation drilling robot, an error compensation method based on co-kriging is proposed in this paper. The error similarity based on the kinematic of drilling robot is proposed firstly. Then, the positional errors of a set of points in the workspace are measured by using precision laser tracker. The measurement data are used to fit the cross-variogram of positional error. After the cross-variogram is obtained, the predicted positional errors of verification points can be estimated based on co-kriging. The positions after compensation are given to the drilling robot. The proposed method is carried out on an aviation drilling robot for practical compensation to verify the correctness and effectiveness of the error compensation method. The experimental results show that the average absolute positional error is reduced to 0.1150 mm from 0.7168 mm, and that the maximum absolute positional error is reduced to 0.2664 mm from 1.3073 mm. The experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the absolute position accuracy of aviation robot and could meet the requirement of aircraft assembly.