Project Team
ARIS Technology (PI), Newport News Shipbuilding, Waukesha Foundry, and Harrison Steel
Background: Robotic inspection improves accuracy, accelerates speed, removes bottlenecks, and reduces scrap. Conversely, manual inspection can miss nearly 30% of defects (source). So what’s holding up robotic adoption in large casting inspection?
Defects compromise part integrity, performance, and safety, leading to costly rework, increased scrap, and, in extreme cases, making entire batches unusable (source). While skilled labor can catch many visual defects, workforce shortages mean that manufacturers cannot solely rely on this skilled labor with many workers approaching retirement and fewer workers entering this space. Even within skilled labor, many defects cannot be detected by the human eye.
With these concerns, more manufacturers are looking to robotics and physical AI-enabled inspection systems to improve accuracy, accelerate speed, remove bottlenecks, and reduce scrap.
This is why robotics is well-positioned to enhance inspection for castings, but focused collaboration across manufacturers, the end-user workforce, and robotics/physical AI providers is required to create solutions that truly make an impact in industry. The ARM Institute, through Technology Project Calls, is uniquely positioned to bring these groups together to generate the practical robotics solutions that industries need. The ARM Institute’s Dual-Mobile Robotic Platform for Large Casting Inspection Project led by ARIS Technology with Newport News Shipbuilding, Waukesha Foundry, and Harrison Steel highlights how this collaboration leads to real-world impact.
The ARM Institute’s Role: Funding Casting & Forging Projects to Secure US Manufacturing
The ARM Institute was created to get robotics, physical AI, and automation into the hands of manufacturers of all sizes and prepare the manufacturing workforce for roles working with these technologies. Our funded projects, selected through ARM Institute Project Calls, bridge the gaps between industry, government, and academia to catalyze solutions that address critical areas of need.
Our automation services enable us to work directly with industry to objectively identify how robotics can (and in some cases, cannot) strengthen your manufacturing operations. We can then de-risk customized solutions in-house or bring these problems to our 500+ member organization consortium for ideation. In tandem, our workforce modernization services help manufacturers understand the current skills of their workforce and the training needed to ensure they’re ready for automated solutions.
This project highlight explores how an ARM Institute project team, funded through an ARM Institute Project Call, collaborated to advance a dual-mobile robotic platform to inspect large castings.
Overview of Our Dual-Mobile Robotic Platform for Large Casting Inspection Project
In this project, ARM Member ARIS Technology collaborated with four foundries across the Organic Industrial Base (OIB), Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and commercial manufacturers to identify challenges and use cases that can be solved using robotics. The identified challenges centered on manual inspection bottlenecks, the inability to readily automate high mix low volume production, varying inspection requirements, concerns about speed-to-quality tradeoffs, capability limitations of any one scanner, difficult multi-scanner localization, limitations of portable robotic platforms, lack of sensor fusion visualization, and lack of work instructions for dual-platform solutions.
This challenge identification enabled ARIS to design technical innovations that solve real industry issues that have traditionally limited the use of robotics and automation in inspection for casting and forging.
The project’s technical approach is centered on the following tasks:
- Design of two mobile platforms with long to medium range and short to near-surface range
- Development of two interoperable mobile platforms for global and local scanning accuracy
- Development of a guide operator to easily relocate the platforms to optimal positions
- Process development to increase the accuracy of the relocalization
- Platform sequence planning using digital twin simulation
- Generation of intuitive measurement plans
- Sensor fusion and accurately localized comprehensive dataset
This work resulted in the production of a complete dual-platform system for thermal, long-range, and short-range scanning for various part sizes and inspection requirements.
Impact of Our Dual-Mobile Robotic Platform for Large Casting Inspection Project
This project recently marked a public demonstration at the 2026 Automate Show with the team demonstrating the project using a large plastic truck fender. Later this year, the team will demonstrate the project on-site at Harrison Steel, using real parts in a foundry setting.
The team’s work resulted in reduced inspection time, improved measurement planning, and improved data quality with a scalable system. Manufacturers participating in the project are hoping to see reduction in machine set-up time and reduced costs of inspection, part transportation, and layout configuration.
The project team aims to scale the system across several manufacturing facilities with the potential for transition to other industries, including agriculture, mining, and large ground vehicle manufacturing. The technology is expected to reduce inspection bottlenecks, improve accuracy, and save time and labor, supporting DoW programs like production of the Columbia and Virginia-class submarines.
Get Hands-On with the Results: Project Outputs
ARM Members will have access to the following project outputs or consortium-developed intellectual property (CDIP) on the ARM Member Community, as well as more detailed reports and videos when the project is formally closed out later this year:
- Business case on utilizing robotic scanning and inspection for the DIB and OIB across various facilities
- Seamless and continuous localization process documentation for mobile inspection platforms
- Data study report on the capability of the delivered system to perform highly accurate layout inspection for DoW parts
- Dataset and data study report on high-resolution scan data evaluation analyzing how much of surface profile defects can be identified with 3D scanning and what other modality is needed
- Report on follow-on project technical approach to (1) Fully mobile systems and (2) Additional sensor integration for multi-modal inspection
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ABOUT THE ARM INSTITUTE
The ARM (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing) Institute is a Manufacturing Innovation Institute (MII) funded by the Office of the Secretary of War under Agreement Number W911NF-17-3-0004 and is part of the Manufacturing USA® network. The ARM Institute leverages a unique and robust 500+ member organizations and partners across industry, academia, and government to make robotics, autonomy, and artificial intelligence more accessible to U.S. manufacturers large and small, train and empower the manufacturing workforce, strengthen our economy and global competitiveness, and elevate national security and resilience. Based in Pittsburgh, PA since 2017, the ARM Institute’s mission is to assert the US as the leading nation in manufacturing output through the adoption of robotics and AI. For more information, visit www.arminstitute.org and follow the ARM Institute on LinkedIn and X.