Soaring To New Heights: How Ai And Robotics Revolutionize Aviation Manufacturing

With the rise of intelligent robotics and artificial intelligence, the aviation industry has entered a new era. These technologies are about to answer some of the industry’s most pressing questions: How can production be ramped up in a resourceefficient way? How can quality and cost be controlled while changing the industry’s demography forces to reconsider old approaches and beliefs? These new tools can scale complex production processes and even automate process steps that were considered impossible. However, transforming from fossil fuelhungry machines to sustainable, preferably hydrogen-powered planes is not enough. The manufacturing processes must catch up and become as sustainable as we can make them for future generations.

“One should always remember that technological evolutions and revolutions are often not triggered by their technical capabilities. instead, it is a combination of technological, regulatory, financial, market and other aspects that lead to real breakthroughs”

Examples of potential technologies for this task are cobots, autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs), or drones with sensors such as cameras or LiDARs that move into production facilities and scan their surroundings. Captured sensor data can then be analyzed via Computer Vision (CV) models or other smart algorithms so that the machine achieves a situational awareness that goes far beyond conventional distance, velocity, or comparable measurements. In that way, machines can act as worker guidance and even interact with their human counterparts via natural language processing (NLP), which has been of interest even a long time before the latest release of ChatGPT. 

“Hey robot, hand me the screwdriver!” – wouldn’t that be nice? If used intelligently, these machines can save time and money, reduce the energy consumption of inefficient processes, help workers increase productivity and quality, or support them with non-ergonomic or even dangerous tasks.

Meanwhile, hidden data analytics power the manufacturing processes of tomorrow. What has long been touted as “Industry 4.0” is simply a logical and overdue utilization of existing process data to create better-informed decisions. Where is a particular aircraft on the shop floor? And what has happened to it in prior production steps? Although this data already exists on a granular level, data streams are often not yet fused and therefore left unused. In contrast, today’s results are slow, outdated, and often highly manual manufacturing processes that cannot keep up with the demands of our modern world. We can solve this issue, but we need to make use of the process data, the digital gold, that is already available and that has been neglected for too long.

Combining these technologies in aviation, such as robots and artificial intelligence, is especially appealing. Here, lot sizes are usually small compared to other high-volume industries, and assembly lines cannot be equipped with only hard-coded robots that do the same action repeatedly. Promising approaches, yet still in their industrial infancy, include, for example, Reinforcement Learning, a particular approach within the domain of artificial intelligence where a robot learns its behavior based on simulated or real experience. In the future, robots will not be programmed anymore. Instead, they will be given a task and then come up with the best possible solution. This will change the way we think about manufacturing. And it will change the entire way we work in production environments around the globe

So what’s on the roadmap for the near future? Supportive robotic systems for assembly and inspection tasks, smart analysis tools, and recommender systems that facilitate datadriven decisions are obvious solutions that we will see more and more in the aviation industry. Beyond this, AI and robotics could even be coupled with other digital technologies: Smart glasses could display suitable assembly instructions or be used to control an assisting robot. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), such as blockchains like Ethereum, could be used for fraud detection and prevention and to verify data integrity. Robot manufacturers subsequently open their proprietary interfaces so that programmers can truly connect various robotic systems. Is all of this coming for sure? We cannot tell. But one should always remember that technological evolutions and revolutions are often not triggered by their technical capabilities. Instead, it is a combination of technological, regulatory, financial, market and other aspects that lead to real breakthroughs

And the best for last: Will AI robots even replace pilots? Surely not anytime soon due to the residual mathematical errors that come with most deep learning models and due to societal concerns and regulations – but undoubtedly a possibility in the future. However, a “flying” AI would be among many other technologies that seemed unthinkable before their introduction: The first powered flight, the breaking of the sound barrier, fly-by-wire and potentially all-electric aircraft in the future, just to name a few. Sounds like a good company for disruptive technologies, doesn’t it?