With the large increase in the demand for travel during the Spring Festival, the safety of civil aviation passenger transportation has aroused people’s attention. As a result, the number of aircraft that have been carefully inspected and maintained has also increased over and over again. In order to reduce ground handling time and improve safety through improved maintenance, Lufthansa Technik and the Institute of Aircraft Production Technology at Hamburg Technological University worked with two industrial partners to develop the mobile robot “Morfi” for the automatic inspection of the aircraft’s skins. The IGUS bearing technology with its latest technical support to help the body to reduce weight and provide a new and creative design.

There are about 10 million flights a year in European airspace, and each flight requires the machinery to implement the highest safety standards. Aircraft maintenance is very careful in order to detect the smallest defects. As part of the two research projects, Lufthansa Technik and the Aircraft Technology Institute of Hamburg University of Technology, in collaboration with two industrial partners EDEVIS GmbH and IFF GmbH, developed a robot for carrying out hot-cracking inspection of commercial aircraft The outer skin, and will replace the previous complex program.

Manually performed inspections prior to using Morfi robots require significant staff effort and maintenance costs. The emergence of the Morfi robot completely solved this problem by moving independently of the aircraft fuselage and its thermal imaging measurement sensor can be precisely positioned in the desired inspection area. With a short electric pulse, the inductor (coil) heats the surface a few Kelvin. At the same time, IR images were recorded with an IR camera. Workers can then quickly and easily identify potential cracks on the screen.

Morfi robots with IGUS bearing technology are 15% lighter. Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP) together with high-strength aluminum and friction-optimized high-performance plastic greatly reduce the body weight by a total of about 15%. At the same time, IGUS bearing products give developers a high degree of design freedom. Therefore, the tool holding area made of CFRP can be easily connected to the iglidur bearing bush mounted in the arm.