High value manufacturing is an essential component of the UK economy, contributing strongly to our economic prosperity and engineering status around the world.
The growth in high value manufacturing to support aerospace, nuclear and other high integrity engineering components, has placed huge pressure on the rapid delivery of high quality Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) to inspect these parts. Autonomous robotic inspection systems are now needed to satisfy the requirements of manufacturing.
Conventional manual inspection
Currently, much inspection of safety critical components (sometimes requiring 100% part inspection) is performed manually, leading to bottlenecks associated with the inspection.
Where robots are employed they typically follow pre-programmed paths making them unsuitable to handle, inspect and disassemble parts with a significant tolerance or variability. Increased robotic autonomy is needed to improve throughput.
Inspection in Remanufacture
With supplies of resources and energy limited, the transition to a low carbon circular economy is key to the UK's Industrial Strategy. Remanufacturing can support this transition by reducing preventing waste and improving resource management.
Autonomous Inspection plays a critical role in assuring the quality of remanufactured products.
