JUNE 20239MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSprocess data, the digital gold, that is already available and that has been neglected for too long.In aviation, the combination of the above technologies, such as robots and artificial intelligence, is especially appealing. Here, lot sizes are usually small as compared to other high volume industries and assembly lines cannot just be equipped with a large number of hard-coded robots that repeat the same action over and over again. Promising approaches, yet still in their industrial infancy, include for example Reinforcement Learning which is a particular approach within the domain of artificial intelligence where a robot learns its behavior based on simulated or even on its real experience. In the future, robots will not be programmed anymore. Instead, they will be given a task and will then come up with the best possible solution themselves. 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 as well as smart analysis tools and recommender systems that facilitate data driven decisions are obvious solutions that we will see more and more in the aviation industry. Beyond this, AI and robotics could even be imagined to be coupled with other digital technologies: Smart glasses could display suitable assembly instructions or could be used to control an assisting robot. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) such as blockchains like Ethereum could be used for fraud detection and prevention as well as for the verification of data integrity. And robot manufacturers are subsequently opening 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 keep in mind that technological evolutions and even revolutions are often not triggered by just their technical capabilities. Instead, it is usually 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 mathematical residual 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 a large number of other technologies that seemed unthinkable prior to 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 good company for disruptive technologies, doesn't it? In the future, robots will not be programmed anymore. Instead, they will be given a task and will then come up with the best possible solution themselves
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