A multi-engine, instrument rated pilot, James Wynbrandt has been an AIN and Business Jet Traveler contributor since 2003. His in-depth reporting and insightful features have won more than a dozen editorial honors, including two National Business Aviation Association Gold Wing Awards (2019; 2021), and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Barron’s, Fortune, Forbes, and Smithsonian Air &amp; Space. He has flown his Mooney M20K 252 on assignments throughout North and Central America and the Caribbean. Wynbrandt is also the author of Flying High (Wiley &amp; Sons), a biography of Jet Blue founder David Neeleman, as well as histories, references works, and books on a variety of other topics from major publishers. He lives in New York City.

Contributor - Business Aviation

James Wynbrandt

With robotics and AI expanding their presence in aerospace—and within the Farnborough International Airshow exhibition halls—the British government is highlighting at the UK Research and Innovation airshow display (Innovation Zone 3796) its Robotics for a Safer World Challenge. The Challenge is a £93 million ($123 million) grant program aimed at speeding development of safer and more productive technologies for working in extreme environments.

 


Potential applications include robots and drones that work in high radiation areas, undersea, in confined spaces, and outer space. While much of the technology is available today, the two major impediments to progress are “regulations and public perception,” said Andrew Tyrer, interim director of the Robotics Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.&nbsp;

 


The Challenge is currently funding five different use cases for drones in five UK cities. At the Farnborough Airshow display, VTOL Technologies is exhibiting the flying wing built for one of the challenges, designed to deliver medical supplies between hospitals in London—a job currently done by motorbike.

 


At FIA, Challenge leaders are eager to interface with “technology providers and people who don’t necessarily identify themselves as being in the [drone and robotics] marketplace,” said Tyrer. “They have the technology, but realize they can transfer it” to these future applications.

 


Rolls Mx Bots

 


Meanwhile UK engine maker Rolls-Royce is demonstrating how robotics could "revolutionize" the future of engine maintenance. In what it describes as an element of its new "IntelligentEngine" concept, the company is working with the University of Nottingham and Harvard University to see how "snake"-like robots could go into engines "like an endoscope." This could range up to having a "swarm" of miniature robots that could enter the engine to do inspections and even repairs (in some cases controlled by engineers in what R-R terms "boreblending." This could, for example, remove the need to take an engine off-wing, or at least make decision-making on maintenance actions more reliable.

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