Boeing Patents Fully Automated Fuselage Manufacturing Plant

Boeing has been in the business of manufacturing airplanes for decades and it doesn’t plan on quitting anytime soon. The company has to adapt to the changing technological environments which require it to make changes in the way it does things now. Boeing has been granted a patent recently for a fully automated plant that’s going to build fuselages for its airplanes.

The patented manufacturing facility will have six assembly cells, a feeder line area and a robot holding area, one cell will be used to assemble one fuselage, the materials for the fuselage will be received in the feeder line area whereas idle robots will be stationed in the robot holding area.

Assembly cells will be selected based on rate and firing order which is going to control the timing and patch of movements by the automated guided vehicles that will be moving the materials in the facility. Once everything is in place a set of robots will be commanded to move from the holding area towards the cell.

At the cell robots will fasten the structures and join everything together, currently this is done by hand, but not only will this arrangement help Boeing save time it’s also going to increase the efficiency of the production line since it will be possible for multiple fuselages to be assembled simultaneously across the six cells.

Boeing doesn’t have this patented plant operational as yet but this patent goes to show that it has considered about further automating the manufacturing process and may pull the trigger on the development of such a facility when it seems feasible enough.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: General
Tags: boeing, patents