Global Fastener News

FEATURE

MEDIA SPOTLIGHT – One of the world’s largest robotics companies invented a new automated system to install 50,000 fasteners on the fuselage of each new Boeing 777.  Boeing is counting on robots to cut production costs.

The Puget Sound Business Journalreported on the testing the robot in an industrial park near Boeing’s Everett, WA, plant.

“There, orange robotic arms bend and pivot in a mechanized dance,” reporter Steve Wilhelm of the Business Journal described the test. 

Today the fasteners are installed by hand.

Wilhelm describes the scene: “Twin robot arms mounted on the machine’s self-driven, wheeled platform will slowly creep along the inside of the fuselage. At the same pace, a crawler outside the fuselage will aim a corresponding arm at the plane’s exterior. The drilling, placement and completion of each fastener from the inside and outside robot arms will be perfectly aligned with each other for an instant, before moving on to be perfectly aligned for the next drilling and fastening moment.”

“Think of it like a sewing machine,” Boeing vice president of 777 operations Jason Clark, told the Business Journal.

The orange robots are engineered by Kuka Systems, the German company which engineered robots to build cars.

The robots are also about cutting costs to compete with Europe’s Airbus and the emerging Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China, which is developing a competing aircraft to the Boeing 737.

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Editor’s Note: Articles in MEDIA SPOTLIGHT are excerpts from publications or broadcasts which show the industry what the public is reading or hearing about fasteners and fastener companies.