Rolls-Royce Is Building Cockroach-Like Robots to Fix Plane Engines

DooKey

DooKey

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Rolls-Royce is trying to find a way to inspect aircraft engines in a more efficient way and they believe tiny robots are going to be the way to go. They're developing cockroach-like robots that will enter the engine and inspect all of those hard to get to spots that take lots of time and effort for humans to do. One expectation is a reduction of a five hour job to as little as five minutes. Pretty cool stuff in robotics if you ask me. Check out the video.

Watch the video here.

The roaches would work in tandem. One would enter a combustion chamber, for example, to scope out any danger or to remove debris. A second robot - one designed specifically for the job, or re-designed on the fly to perform less common jobs - would follow to complete the repair. The buddy system, so to speak, allows the robots to perform simple tasks and diagnose problems.
 
Swarm robots / swarm intelligence have been an off again/on again love affair topic since before college. Just waiting for the electronics to get small enough to be totally effective.
 
They didn't really say anything in the video about making repairs to engines. It just stated that these can be used for inspection tasks. Of course, at some point I can see engines and roboroaches designed to work together for repair tasks. A tiny robot wouldn't be able to turn some highly torqued down bolt that's 25 times larger than it is. Eventually, they will probably change how engines like these are built so that roboroaches can work on them more effectively.
 
And airline tickets will continue to go up while seat spacing gets smaller and service gets worse.
 
stefan231 said:
https://kotaku.com/cockroaches-from-mars-are-out-to-kill-you-1557436080
Click to expand...
It's the Martian SandKings you gotta really worry about.

Sandkings5.jpg
 
Until one of or some of them malfunction while in the combustion engine and then what?
 
Rahh said:
Until one of or some of them malfunction while in the combustion engine and then what?
Click to expand...

Send another one in to get it out! :D

I hope the optics are good enough, so that it's really an advantage to taking the engine apart. Seems like you could miss a lot with something like this.
 
We are not goping to be happy until we can find a way to build a robot that will kill all of us! The little flesh rippers will be equipped to build more of themselves. And we thought cockroaches were bad.......
 
I can see a use for these in space, and am puzzled why they haven’t been developing semi-autonomous diagnostic and repair robots to go along with the mars lander or with very expensive satellites we no longer have the capacity to repair in space.
 
Build a self repairing engine already with nano bots and quantum power whatever and be done with it...
 
Did NO ONE watch Stargate SG-1 when the Replicators attacked!



We're doomed!
 
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