Project Team
ThoughtForge Inc. (Principal Investigator), Northrop Grumman Corporation, Siemens Corporation, and Airbus
Background
This technology project was selected from the ARM Institute’s 25-01 Core-Funded Tech Project Call that addressed the following special topic areas:
- Rapid Re-Tasking and Robot Agility
- Multi-Robot, Multi-Human Collaboration
- Adaptive Real-Time Path Planning and Control
In addition to these Special Topic Areas, the ARM Institute, in collaboration with the institute Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), government partners, and other consortium experts, outlined the following manufacturing areas of interest that project teams were encouraged to leverage as example use cases: (1) casting and forging, (2) manufacturing of hypersonics, (3) manufacturing of energetics, (4) manufacturing of garments and other textile goods, and (4) robotic inspection in confined spaces.
Project Description
Foreign Object Damage (FOD) is commonly defined as damage to any army vehicle, equipment or property because of object alien to the vehicle or equipment damaged. FOD detection within aerospace and defense manufacturing require inspecting deep airframe structures and ducts with complex geometries from various angles. These processes usually involve either a human worker squeezing and inserting themself into an airframe or an air duct for inspections. Existing Non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques like ultrasound and x-ray methods struggle with layered composite materials used in modern aircraft structures. As a result, FOD detection in continues to be an especially challenging task with significant room for improvements. This project teams aims to address this gap through the development of a robotic system enabled with real-time motion planning capability that would allow navigation of airframe structures for fixtureless inspection of FOD.