Promoted Content: Smart Tools for the Airbus Factory of the Future

Today’s aerospace factory floor is nothing like the hectic, noisy production facility of the past. The latest techniques, designs, and equipment make modern manufacturing efficient, organised, and structured. And what about tomorrow? The future of the aircraft factory is pushing emerging technologies to improve the competitiveness of Airbus manufacturing processes where manual operations are still predominant today.

Aircraft production efficiencies

Using National Instruments (NI) System on Module Airbus is developing three smart tool families to improve airplane production efficiency. Manufacturing and assembly of aircraft, involves tens of thousands of steps that operators must follow. A single mistake in the process could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix, making the room for error very small with many checks in place to ensure quality.   By adding intelligence to the system, the smart tools understand the actions that the operator must perform next and automatically adjust the tools to the proper settings, which simplifies the task for the operator. Once the action is completed, the smart tools can also monitor and log the results of the action, which improves the efficiency of the production process.