One of the main problems facing the industry today is the manufacturing and repairing tasks of large components (10 meters long and above). Indeed, manufacturing processes, such as machining, milling, grinding, polishing, deburring, welding, riveting, screwing or painting, on this type of components and structures, are still carried out manually mainly because of the problems related to the kinematics structure of the machines. That is the reason why there is no automated system that can achieve the tolerances required by the industry.
With the current State of Art it is very difficult to develop a robust system accurate enough for such operations, mainly because the positioning error grows exponentially when the size of the machine increases, the accuracy results from the accumulation of different errors, starting with the error in the manufacturing process of the machine itself.
There is an important gap between the accuracy that is currently achieved on small products and components and the precision achieved on large structures. As a result, it becomes increasingly necessary to develop a system capable of extrapolating the tolerances achieved in small components to large parts.
The main objective of the MEGAROB project is to develop a flexible autonomous platform, based on robotics and mechatronics, to perform high accuracy manufacturing tasks on large components (>10 meters long) which can be found in different industrial sectors such as aeronautic, wind mills, civil engineering, railway and ships manufacturers, achieving a long-range and high-accuracy robotic system adaptable to all types, sizes, quantity and complexity of parts, extensive to any other kind of sector or industry, as logistic, automotive or big machinery manufacturing.