Printing FlexiFab Project

The FlexiFab system will provide the following key competitive advantages to the European welding Industry

Enable European fabricators, metal-workers and welding companies to effectively compete in the growing use of aluminium alloys in the light-weight transport sector.
Capitalising on the increasing pressure to replace traditional iron and steel material with aluminium alloys to reduce weight and thus fuel consumption of vehicles, trains, ships/boats and aeroplanes.
Reduce the costs associated with the fabrication of aluminium structures, especially focussed on components used within the transport sectors.

RobotLab@Lund will mainly work on the sensor integration, logging for weld status for automated quality asurance and control system of industrial robots for the frictions stir welding process.

The system will use friction stir welding technology (FSW), invented by one of the project partners, TWI, in the beginnining of the 1990s. The welding method offers a number of benefits for aluminium joining/welding such as

Concept schematic of the FlexiFab System

Excellent weld mechanical properties.
A mechanised repeatable process.
No special pre-weld edge profiling or cleaning required.
No shielding gas required.
Low distortion and shrinkage due to solid-state nature of welding process.
Welding in any position.
High efficiency processing with very low energy consumption.
Ability to weld the ‘non-weldable’ aluminium alloys such as the 2000 and 7000 series
Operator Health & Safety benefits:
- No harmful welding fumes or hot metal spatter.
- No UV radiation hazards.

FlexiFab dissemination material

Click here to download the FlexiFab press release (2016 version)

Click here to download the FlexiFab poster

Click here to download the FlexiFab trifold

Publications

Martin Karlsson, Fredrik Bagge Carlson, Martin Holmstrand, Anders Robertsson, Jeroen De Backer, Luisa Quintino, Eurico Assuncao, Rolf Johansson: "Robotic Friction Stir Welding—Seam-Tracking Control, Force Control and Process Supervision". Industrial Robot, 50:5, pp. 722–730, 2023.

Martin Karlsson: Human–Robot Interaction Based on Motion and Force Control. PhD Thesis Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden, February 2019.

Fredrik Bagge Carlson: Machine Learning and System Identification for Estimation in Physical Systems. PhD Thesis Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden, December 2018.

Fredrik Bagge Carlson: "Modeling and Estimation Topics in Robotics". Licentiate Thesis Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden, March 2017.

Martin Karlsson, Fredrik Bagge Carlson, Jeroen De Backer, Martin Holmstrand, Anders Robertsson, Rolf Johansson: "Robotic Seam Tracking for Friction Stir Welding under Large Contact Forces". In: 7th Swedish Production Symposium (SPS), 2016.

Fredrik Bagge Carlson, Martin Karlsson, Anders Robertsson, Rolf Johansson: "Particle Filter Framework for 6D Seam Tracking Under Large External Forces Using 2D Laser Sensors". In 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Daejeon, Korea, Republic of, October 2016.

Fredrik Bagge Carlson, Anders Robertsson, Rolf Johansson: "Modeling and Identification of Position and Temperature Dependent Friction Phenomena without Temperature Sensing". In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems , 2015, Hamburg, Germany, September 2015.

Fredrik Bagge Carlson, Rolf Johansson, Anders Robertsson: "Six DOF Eye-to-Hand Calibration from 2D Measurements Using Planar Constraints". In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems , 2015, Hamburg, Germany, September 2015.