We’ve all aware of endoscopy and how it works through the body without the need of surgery. Almost similar concept is applied in the recently revealed ‘snake robots’ of Rolls Royce. These robots just like endoscope, are miniatures that move through or crawl through the engine insides. Called the Intelligent Engine vision, it was introduced for the first time in 2018 at the Singapore Airshow.
The idea behind the concept is to speed the maintenance process and reduce the bottlenecks like taking the engine off during a maintenance or inspecting the automobile quickly enough. Its benefits to the end users include time saving, cost saving, efficiency and speed in the maintenance process.
It introduced 4 robotic technologies at the show. Here’s a look through them –
Swarm Robots – These miniature robots are of 10mm size and can be placed in the central area of the engine with the help of a snake robot. These robots can inspect the areas of the engine that are hard to reach. They also have attached cameras and send real time videos to the operator thus helping them to inspect the engine properly without removing it from the aircraft.
Snake Robots – These robots have the flexibility to commute through the narrow patches of the engine areas just like an endoscope and then aiding patch repair work of thermal barrier coatings.
Remote Bore-blending Robots – this machine that can be controlled by specialist engineers has been developed by the Rolls Royce team of Nottingham University. Thus, allowing non expert local teams to just install the tool for maintaining complicated maintenance tasks repair of damaged compressor blades with the help of grind parts and leave it to the specialists to manage the same remotely. A lot of time and cost is saved as the specialists don’t have to commute to the location of the aircraft.
Inspect Robots – These are pencil sized robots in a network of periscopes and are permanently installed within the engine. Thus, they enable self-inspection with the help of periscope cameras for recognizing and reporting requirements of maintenance.
The good news is that technologies like boreblending robots are already tested and will find its way to the automobile workplace over the coming years. But, swarm robots have still a long way to go before they become reality, but it definitely has paved the way to a leap frog progess in the field of automobile maintenance.
On the flip side, they could eat up inspection and maintenance jobs, definitely a question to ponder upon?
ACSCE is good engineering colleges in Bangalore, The Dept of CSE was established in 2009 with an intake of 60. affiliated under VTU with AICTE.