4 ms·

Looking at those pictures I wonder how assembly, from unloading cargo to final testing, could be fully automated. I came to think that until we automate automat

by hawski 10y ago

Looking at those pictures I wonder how assembly, from unloading cargo to final testing, could be fully automated. I came to think that until we automate automation it will be quite hard. Humans with assist of tools are flexible enough - especially on this scale.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Gravityloss 10y ago
The structure could be different. For example with latest composites you can assemble the dry fibers, maybe with some stitching to keep them in place, wrap them in a bag and use vacuum to infuse them with resin. No fasteners and large monolithic parts. Sometimes you need an autoclaves, sometimes not. Things like point loads would need to be designed out as much as possible. Likely because of large existing investments, politics and path dependence, the new airliners built differently will have come from somewhere else. Airbus itself did disrupt the market with composites back in the day with their first plane, and they have a multi megawatt class electric ones in the works, so who knows, maybe they can renew?
- coredog64 10y ago
  Large monolithic parts are harder to repair. That's the upside to the current setup of panels riveted to a frame. Any one of those panels can be drilled out and replaced. Boeing has a special team called "AOG" (aircraft on ground) that will go out to a repairable aircraft that isn't airworthy and make it so. Kind of hard to do that when you need to bring along a megaton autoclave and portable cleanroom.
mtw 10y ago
you will have to re-think the whole assembly process. And it's a bit far-fetched to think of an automated process for a A321. I would try to design a small plane - such as the next-gen Cessna - that could be built mostly by robots. Maybe hire most of the engineers from the carkmaker industry (Mercedes-Benz, Tesla). Then move up from there.
- ryanwaggoner 10y ago
  I think the problem there is one of scale (same as here, actually). Hardly any small planes get built. Cirrus is the largest builder of small airplanes and they sold 276 new aircraft in 2013. These planes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but even if you slashed it so that new planes only cost $50k, you still have two huge hurdles: 1. There aren't very many certificated pilots in the US (600k?), and a small fraction who fly regularly enough for owning a plane to make sense. Not a huge market. 2. This does nothing for operating costs. Fuel, maintenance, insurance, storage all mean that even for a small airplane, you should expect to spend $100 - 300 / hr for operating costs, depending on details of the plane and how often you fly. This means that the market really can't expand that much. The best hope for putting lots of new airplanes in the air every year is a viable self-piloting VTOL electric aircraft. I don't see anything else doing it, and energy density of batteries means that we're probably decades away from that.
cylinder 10y ago
They only employ 200 or so employees, as per the article. We are talking probably $10 million in payroll a year which is a rounding error at this scale. The automation fetishism is exhausting.
- swalsh 10y ago
  Payroll is a terrible number to look at to estimate if automation is worth doing. Automation provides ancillary benefits which are often more important than simply replacing people. For example automation can provide increased consistency (perhaps reducing human error?) for some tasks it can do the work faster. Sometimes automating things allows a company to do that thing more often. There's a bunch of reasons to automate, and replacing people is probably the last reason to do it (since often the people just get shifted to tasks which previously didn't have enough resources to do, sometimes those tasks pay off big)
  - secstate 10y ago
    To say nothing of the fact that automated tasks work 24/7 under the most basic human observation. Silly humans needing to sleep, eat and rest.
  - mikepurvis 10y ago
    I think the point is that automation doesn't have to mean _total_ automation, with the lights out. Giving a human labourer a better, smarter set of tools can capture a significant chunk of the automation benefits, while also retaining the flexibility and awareness of having a human present for whatever the task is.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Who maintains the robots? Precision equipment needs to maintain calibration, so who does that work? More robots? Is it robots all the way down?
    - pm90 10y ago
      Ultimately, I think this is where we are going to end up. Humans will mostly exist for analyzing trends in the market and to improve optimize automation. Almost all manual labor will be eliminated.
GuB-42 10y ago
I think it would be pointless to try to automate the assembly of airliners completely. These aircraft cost in the order of $100M and they are produced in the thousands across many years for the most successful models. And it is likely to stay this way, it's not like if someday, we'll all have our own personal Airbus. The economies of scale don't justify a fully automatic assembly line.
- coredog64 10y ago
  Not only that, but even what an outsider might think of as the same plane is unique per customer. Qantas wants the holes for the lavs here, while JAL doesn't care because they are going to use it for an all cattle class commuter flight. The manufacturers fight it, but at the end of the day the customer is always right.
awalton 10y ago
The question is how much of it should be automated that isn't already. It's not like they're building 737s and A321s for everyone - at some point, human labor just makes better business sense, though I admit I have no idea where those lines are - I don't have the factory experience to tell you. It's also likely they'd pretty significantly redesign a lot of the parts if they were going for more automation - a lot of aircraft construction is done in a way that makes it difficult even for humans to get decent access - the robots to get into those kinds of tight spaces to work would look more appropriate on the International Space Station, and may not be much faster at the job due to all of the extra maneuvering to get in and out of tight spaces. (In fact, on most existing aircraft designs, to do much with robots you'd almost certainly need a human operator standing by just to make sure it didn't accidentally punch through a firewall or the tin can hull, since a lot of assembly steps require moving fixtures around and installing temporaries for support, which may be more ad-hoc than planned procedure. As an example of design and construction philosophies, both Boeing and Airbus have adopted a more "outside-in" approach to building aircraft, where the principal components of the airframe are built first and everything is fastened to them as construction evolves. This is a very human- and aircraft-centric construction philosophy, since it means the workers need to move around the plane a lot, rather than the plane's components coming to the workers. This works better with the scales in mind, since the aircraft are already constructed in some of the largest buildings on the planet, and moving large assemblies around a lot during construction means employee downtime and slower delivery performance. But what if instead they took a tunnel building-like approach where the interior would be mostly assembly-line built in ring sections, fastened together into modular inner compartments, and then fitted to external fuselage pieces before everything is snapped together in one big final assembly step? The smaller sections work better for both humans and automation, and the larger pieces snapping together Lego-like means you can even reduce the need for as many large assembly buildings down to just final assembly. It could possibly be much better for composite construction, as it would mean fewer external seams on the aircraft (which in turn must suck for the carbon fiber engineers, since it means even larger autoclaves and components they would have to deal with), which in turn gives you even more of the advantages you already are seeing on planes like the Dreamliner (plus likely a much quieter cabin, since it would be better separated and insulated from the hull, and fewer fasteners means less vibration noise generated as well as shorter assembly times). Of course, Boeing and Airbus are huge companies with lots of extreme long term planning when it comes to budgeting and logistics, so I doubt if either company will make revolutionary strides in this direction rather than evolutionary strides. With product deliveries over multiple decades and lifecycles approaching a century, it's easy to see why these companies are conservative and evolutionary.
csours 10y ago
A more pertinent question is: What can be automated in a cost effective manner? People from outside manufacturing look at automation like it's a holy grail - and it can be in some applications - but it has to make sense. Step 1 of the evaluation would be to look at how much it costs to have a human do those operations now. This should be relatively easy. Step 2 would evaluate what process changes are needed to enable robots to perform the operations. A robot cannot handle the material to be assembled in the same way a human can, so often a human (or other automated system) "stages" material for a robot. Robots do not work well on moving pieces, so you may have to stop other operations for the robot, impacting efficiency. Robotic vision systems need to be set up and debugged, unlike human vision systems (which have typically had 20 years or so of self-programming) For automation to work well, the whole process chain has to be designed for automation. Step 3 would look at the raw cost of robotic components and programming, which is relatively easy. Step 4 would then evaluate the value add per operation of the robotic system. All in all, humans make excellent robots most of the time, as they come with Two Six-Axis arms with multi-articulated effectors (hands), and a sophisticated 3D vision system. Humans have an on-board, self-sustaining power system, and are very mobile. Some humans are even self-diagnosing and self-improving! Try a Human Today!

by hawski 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Gravityloss 10y ago

The structure could be different. For example with latest composites you can assemble the dry fibers, maybe with some stitching to keep them in place, wrap them in a bag and use vacuum to infuse them with resin. No fasteners and large monolithic parts. Sometimes you need an autoclaves, sometimes not. Things like point loads would need to be designed out as much as possible. Likely because of large existing investments, politics and path dependence, the new airliners built differently will have come from somewhere else. Airbus itself did disrupt the market with composites back in the day with their first plane, and they have a multi megawatt class electric ones in the works, so who knows, maybe they can renew?

coredog64 10y ago
Large monolithic parts are harder to repair. That's the upside to the current setup of panels riveted to a frame. Any one of those panels can be drilled out and replaced. Boeing has a special team called "AOG" (aircraft on ground) that will go out to a repairable aircraft that isn't airworthy and make it so. Kind of hard to do that when you need to bring along a megaton autoclave and portable cleanroom.

mtw 10y ago

you will have to re-think the whole assembly process. And it's a bit far-fetched to think of an automated process for a A321. I would try to design a small plane - such as the next-gen Cessna - that could be built mostly by robots. Maybe hire most of the engineers from the carkmaker industry (Mercedes-Benz, Tesla). Then move up from there.

ryanwaggoner 10y ago
I think the problem there is one of scale (same as here, actually). Hardly any small planes get built. Cirrus is the largest builder of small airplanes and they sold 276 new aircraft in 2013. These planes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but even if you slashed it so that new planes only cost $50k, you still have two huge hurdles: 1. There aren't very many certificated pilots in the US (600k?), and a small fraction who fly regularly enough for owning a plane to make sense. Not a huge market. 2. This does nothing for operating costs. Fuel, maintenance, insurance, storage all mean that even for a small airplane, you should expect to spend $100 - 300 / hr for operating costs, depending on details of the plane and how often you fly. This means that the market really can't expand that much. The best hope for putting lots of new airplanes in the air every year is a viable self-piloting VTOL electric aircraft. I don't see anything else doing it, and energy density of batteries means that we're probably decades away from that.

cylinder 10y ago

They only employ 200 or so employees, as per the article. We are talking probably $10 million in payroll a year which is a rounding error at this scale. The automation fetishism is exhausting.

swalsh 10y ago
Payroll is a terrible number to look at to estimate if automation is worth doing. Automation provides ancillary benefits which are often more important than simply replacing people. For example automation can provide increased consistency (perhaps reducing human error?) for some tasks it can do the work faster. Sometimes automating things allows a company to do that thing more often. There's a bunch of reasons to automate, and replacing people is probably the last reason to do it (since often the people just get shifted to tasks which previously didn't have enough resources to do, sometimes those tasks pay off big)
- secstate 10y ago
  To say nothing of the fact that automated tasks work 24/7 under the most basic human observation. Silly humans needing to sleep, eat and rest.
- mikepurvis 10y ago
  I think the point is that automation doesn't have to mean _total_ automation, with the lights out. Giving a human labourer a better, smarter set of tools can capture a significant chunk of the automation benefits, while also retaining the flexibility and awareness of having a human present for whatever the task is.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Who maintains the robots? Precision equipment needs to maintain calibration, so who does that work? More robots? Is it robots all the way down?
  - pm90 10y ago
    Ultimately, I think this is where we are going to end up. Humans will mostly exist for analyzing trends in the market and to improve optimize automation. Almost all manual labor will be eliminated.

GuB-42 10y ago

I think it would be pointless to try to automate the assembly of airliners completely. These aircraft cost in the order of $100M and they are produced in the thousands across many years for the most successful models. And it is likely to stay this way, it's not like if someday, we'll all have our own personal Airbus. The economies of scale don't justify a fully automatic assembly line.

coredog64 10y ago
Not only that, but even what an outsider might think of as the same plane is unique per customer. Qantas wants the holes for the lavs here, while JAL doesn't care because they are going to use it for an all cattle class commuter flight. The manufacturers fight it, but at the end of the day the customer is always right.

awalton 10y ago

The question is how much of it should be automated that isn't already. It's not like they're building 737s and A321s for everyone - at some point, human labor just makes better business sense, though I admit I have no idea where those lines are - I don't have the factory experience to tell you. It's also likely they'd pretty significantly redesign a lot of the parts if they were going for more automation - a lot of aircraft construction is done in a way that makes it difficult even for humans to get decent access - the robots to get into those kinds of tight spaces to work would look more appropriate on the International Space Station, and may not be much faster at the job due to all of the extra maneuvering to get in and out of tight spaces. (In fact, on most existing aircraft designs, to do much with robots you'd almost certainly need a human operator standing by just to make sure it didn't accidentally punch through a firewall or the tin can hull, since a lot of assembly steps require moving fixtures around and installing temporaries for support, which may be more ad-hoc than planned procedure. As an example of design and construction philosophies, both Boeing and Airbus have adopted a more "outside-in" approach to building aircraft, where the principal components of the airframe are built first and everything is fastened to them as construction evolves. This is a very human- and aircraft-centric construction philosophy, since it means the workers need to move around the plane a lot, rather than the plane's components coming to the workers. This works better with the scales in mind, since the aircraft are already constructed in some of the largest buildings on the planet, and moving large assemblies around a lot during construction means employee downtime and slower delivery performance. But what if instead they took a tunnel building-like approach where the interior would be mostly assembly-line built in ring sections, fastened together into modular inner compartments, and then fitted to external fuselage pieces before everything is snapped together in one big final assembly step? The smaller sections work better for both humans and automation, and the larger pieces snapping together Lego-like means you can even reduce the need for as many large assembly buildings down to just final assembly. It could possibly be much better for composite construction, as it would mean fewer external seams on the aircraft (which in turn must suck for the carbon fiber engineers, since it means even larger autoclaves and components they would have to deal with), which in turn gives you even more of the advantages you already are seeing on planes like the Dreamliner (plus likely a much quieter cabin, since it would be better separated and insulated from the hull, and fewer fasteners means less vibration noise generated as well as shorter assembly times). Of course, Boeing and Airbus are huge companies with lots of extreme long term planning when it comes to budgeting and logistics, so I doubt if either company will make revolutionary strides in this direction rather than evolutionary strides. With product deliveries over multiple decades and lifecycles approaching a century, it's easy to see why these companies are conservative and evolutionary.

csours 10y ago

A more pertinent question is: What can be automated in a cost effective manner? People from outside manufacturing look at automation like it's a holy grail - and it can be in some applications - but it has to make sense. Step 1 of the evaluation would be to look at how much it costs to have a human do those operations now. This should be relatively easy. Step 2 would evaluate what process changes are needed to enable robots to perform the operations. A robot cannot handle the material to be assembled in the same way a human can, so often a human (or other automated system) "stages" material for a robot. Robots do not work well on moving pieces, so you may have to stop other operations for the robot, impacting efficiency. Robotic vision systems need to be set up and debugged, unlike human vision systems (which have typically had 20 years or so of self-programming) For automation to work well, the whole process chain has to be designed for automation. Step 3 would look at the raw cost of robotic components and programming, which is relatively easy. Step 4 would then evaluate the value add per operation of the robotic system. All in all, humans make excellent robots most of the time, as they come with Two Six-Axis arms with multi-articulated effectors (hands), and a sophisticated 3D vision system. Humans have an on-board, self-sustaining power system, and are very mobile. Some humans are even self-diagnosing and self-improving! Try a Human Today!