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Rolls-Royce engine inspection solution

Monday 16th September, 2019

Rolls-Royce has presented a range of robotic inspection solutions at the Farnborough Airshow, which could drastically change the way they inspect and maintain engines.

Each project is in varying stages of development but all could reduce the time spent on manual inspection and improve efficiencies.

One project that Rolls-Royce is developing alongside Harvard University is on-wing engine inspections with swarm robots. Swarm robots could be used to map the internal engine area reducing the amount of time spent on manual inspections. The beetle-like bots will be about 10mm in size and are equipped with cameras to provide a live video feed while crawling through engines.

“We thought, rather than doing that traditionally, we could put cameras on the end of small walking beetles and have them work in a team, whereby…collaboratively we start to map the whole environment,” said Dr James Kell, Rolls-Royce on-wing technology specialist.

“It’s a much more efficient way of performing the same kind of inspection. If we did it conventionally, it would take us about five hours. If we did it like this, who knows, we could probably do that in maybe five minutes.”

The beetles would be deployed by snake-like robots that can weave into the guts of a gas turbine. This would still require a skilled person to control the robot, analyse the data and perform any repairs that are needed.

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