As a long-time player in automated fiber placement (AFP) for aerospace, Ingersoll Machine Tools’ ambition has been to make robotic fiber placement affordable to second- and third-tier aerospace part producers. But that ascent into the aerospace market had been held back by several earthbound realities, including the historic inaccuracy of large-scale robotic positioning, the lack of robotic control at the machine operator level, and the high cost of designing and building larger-scale, customized AFP systems. To address this limitation, Siemens evolved its powerful SINUMERIK 840D sl CNC to include Run MyRobot™, its highly sophisticated robotic compensation software. This has enabled Ingersoll to integrate robotics into its new Robotic FP™ fiber placement machine designs, achieving repeatable robotic positioning accuracies to less than 1mm. The robotic motion of a Robotic FP™ machine is easily controlled using the SINUMERIK CNC Operate interface. The control’s intuitive, graphical interface is universal across the Siemens CNC platform. Aerospace customers can achieve higher process efficiencies plant-wide as operators quickly become familiar and efficient using an interface that stays the same from machine to machine, even when moving from 3-axis to 5-axis or a 6-axis robot with numerous more axes (such as turntable, mandrill, linear rail, etc.). The operator’s experience is the same - whether controlling traditional fiber placement, robotic fiber placement, 3D printing, robotic 3D printing, or any CNC machining process. usa.siemens.com/ingersoll-rfp