Research and application of robot assembly technology for satellite batch production

In robot automation operations, in typical batch industrial product assembly lines, the robot only needs to repeatedly perform fixed actions. However, for batch satellite manufacturing, due to the influence of traditional product design and supply chain support, the consistency of different batches and individual products on the satellite production line is still insufficient to support fully automated robot operations. This paper proposes a robot application scheme for the assembly of large-weight components in satellite batch production. For the grasping and placement of products, the robot follows a pre-taught path. For the docking of products with satellites, due to the inconsistent dimensions and flexible component states of the incoming products, the robot performs a rough positioning according to the pre-taught path. In the subsequent precise docking phase, a collaborative human-robot and flexible force control operation method is adopted to achieve safe and flexible robot assembly. This scheme uses fixed paths for the determinable parts of the robot’s operation and collaborative human-robot operations for the uncertain parts, thus balancing the efficiency and safety of robot operations. The proposed scheme has been successfully applied to the production of China’s Internet satellites.