When it comes to the ground inspections of its large C-17 aircraft, the U.S Air Force would prefer a method that reduces the need for military personnel to work in heightened environments.
RE2 Robotics, based in Lawrenceville, might just have the solution it needs. The robotics company announced it received $1.5 million in funding from the Air Force's Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) fund which will be used to further develop a system using its dual RE2 Sapien robotic arms and related technology to autonomously perform tasks on C-17 aircraft in a scissor lift.
According to RE2, the system will cover pre- and post-flight tasks such as at-height visual inspection of the aircraft’s fuselage, wing, and tail; the at-height reading of analog gauges; and other autonomous sustainment activities. Accomplishing these tasks with RE2 robotic arms will greatly reduce the need for military personnel to do them at elevations that could reach the more than 55 feet above ground, RE2 said.
The funding, which is part of the Air Force's larger Mobile Autonomous Aircraft Platform for Sustainment (MAAPS) program, comes shortly after RE2 received $9.5 million in funding from the U.S. Navy a few weeks prior, the largest military contract the company has received to date.
"This is just another win within one of our current thrust areas, which is aviation," said Jorgen Pedersen, president and CEO of RE2. "What's nice about this program is we're helping to perform critical tasks with higher quality. We're helping to keep people safe, and really, that's our vision — to create a safer world through robotics and the way we're doing that is creating these intelligent mobile manipulation systems, whether it's in aviation, whether it's in underwater, whether it's construction — we're there to improve worker safety and productivity."
Pedersen said the goal with this system is to ultimately have a supervised and autonomous solution where the operator is in a safe location, which Pedersen said doesn't even have to be on-site at the aircraft. That operator could then also oversee the inspections of several aircraft at a time.
All of this can be accomplished with RE2's robotic arms and the technology that's used to operate them, Pedersen said.
"We have tools in our toolbox, we have these enabling technologies, whether it's hardware, software or just customizing that software or optimizing it for this particular application," Pedersen said. "It's not like we're starting from scratch. We're building on 20 years of developing robotics technology and just optimizing it."
The employee count at RE2 is "over 90," Pedersen said, and he noted the company is hiring.
