Project Team:
ARIS Technology (Principal Investigator), Newport News Shipbuilding, Waukesha Foundry, Harrison Steel, and Rock Island Arsenal
Background:
This project was selected from the ARM Institute’s Robotic Inspection for Casting & Forging Project Call released in April 2025. Funding for this project call was provided by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Manufacturing Technology Program (OSD ManTech).
Cast and forged components lie at the heart of critical commercial and defense systems, providing a vital contribution to warfighter readiness for the United States. However, these industries are plagued with significant issues, including personnel safety concerns, material availability, and cost, further exacerbated by the legacy platforms, whose designs and processes were largely conceived, defined, and stored on paper. The challenges for the United States to produce low-volume, high mix cast and forged components pose a critical and enduring issue.
This Project Call leveraged the ARM Institute’s extensive prior work on solutions for robotic forging and casting as a foundation with the objectives being derived from the institute’s research, lessons learned from previous projects, and the institute’s Roadmap for Robotics and Automation in Casting and Forging, which was created in partnership with subject matter experts from the institute’s consortium and industry.
Description:
ARIS Technology teamed up with four foundries for this project to ensure scalability and impact for the end users. This project team develop a complete dual-platform system for thermal, long-range and short-range scanning for various part sizes and inspection requirement. Specifically, the team will design two mobile platforms, develop two interoperable mobile platforms for global and local scanning accuracy, generate a process to increase accuracy of the relocalization, create platform sequence planning using digital twin simulation, and leverage intuitive measurement plan generation.