Patent ID: 8277154

Claim:
An apparatus for performing a drilling operation on a particular stackup, the apparatus comprising: a housing; a spindle capable of receiving a drill bit; a spindle motor capable of turning the spindle at a set of different speeds during the drilling operation; a thrust motor capable of moving the spindle in an axial direction; a load sensor capable of detecting a reaction thrust force during the drilling operation to form a detected reaction thrust force; and a controller capable of controlling the spindle motor and the thrust motor to change a drilling speed in response to instructions stored in one or more computer readable storage devices and executed by one or more processors based on the detected reaction thrust force, layer definitions, and material definitions stored in the one or more computer readable storage devices, wherein the layer definitions and the material definitions are for the particular stackup, and wherein the definitions include a peck wait thrust value that specifies a distance the drill bit must travel after completing a full peck motion and moving forward in a material before reading reactive thrust force values from the load sensor.