JUNE 20238MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSWith the rise of intelligent robotics and artificial intelligence, a new era has arrived in the aviation industry. These technologies are about to pose an answer to some of the industry's most pressing questions: How can production be ramped up in a resource-efficient way? How can quality and cost be controlled - while a changing demography forces the industry to reconsider old approaches and beliefs? These new tools have the potential to scale complex production processes and even automate process steps that were long considered impossible to automate. And let's face it: The transformation from fossil fuel hungry machines to sustainable, preferably hydrogen-powered planes is not enough. The manufacturing processes themselves must catch up and become as sustainable as we can possibly make them, for generations to come.Examples of potential technologies for this task are cobots, autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) or drones equipped with sensors such as cameras or LiDARs that move in 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? Used intelligently, these machines can produce time and money savings, reduce the energy consumption of inefficient processes, help workers to increase productivity and quality or support them with non ergonomic or even dangerous tasks. In the meantime, 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 In contrast, today's results are slow, outdated and often highly manual manufacturing processes that cannot keep up with the demands of our modern world.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 SOARING TO NEW HEIGHTS: HOW AI AND ROBOTICS REVOLUTIONIZE AVIATION MANUFACTURINGBy Felix Berteloot, Deputy Head of Automation, ZAL Center of Applied Aeronautical ResearchFelix BertelootIN MY OPINION
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