Snakes on a plane slither in engines

After algorithms spot a problem, snake-like robots may one day be used to investigate faulty engines, saving time and money

JUST sometimes, snakes on a plane can be a good thing. Snake-like robots wielding UV lasers may soon slither deep inside aircraft engines to seek out and repair damage, according to the British jet engine maker Rolls-Royce. Once it is up and running, the technology should help airlines deal with potential engine problems on the spot to keep planes in the air and avoid delays for passengers.

The idea for the snake robot stems partly from the fact that engine makers like Rolls-Royce and General Electric in the US routinely use intelligent algorithms to monitor the health of plane engines in flight. The software analyses data sent from around 100 pressure, temperature and vibration sensors embedded in each engine. These algorithms flag up trouble spots. But taking a plane out of service to strip down the engine can cost an airline millions of dollars - so technologies that can quickly inspect them are needed.

Right now, such checks are performed using a fibre-optic instrument called a borescope, a heavy-duty version of a medical endoscope. It is inserted in one of many 10 millimetre-wide ports dotted around a jet engine, allowing an engineer to look for, say, bird-strike damage to a fan or compressor blade. The trouble is, with Rolls-Royce monitoring 14,000 of its engines, flown by 500 airlines on 4000 aircraft worldwide, there are not enough borescope experts at all the airports the planes visit to do this diagnostic work.

"We don't have enough specialists to go around so we need to automate this capability," says Rolls-Royce senior vice-president Pat Emmott. The firm's answer is to develop a robot that a relatively unskilled engineer can bolt on to an engine and leave to do its job. The snake robot would then go into the engine and feed images back to an expert who controls it remotely, a bit like telesurgery, he says. An engineer could then fix any problem.

Rolls-Royce is developing the technology as part of a ?4 million European research project dubbed Miror, alongside industrial partners, who also need robots that can wriggle into small spaces. The snake robot prototype should be completed by July 2014, Miror project engineer Salvador Cobos Guzman of the University of Nottingham, UK, told a conference on mechatronics in Linz, Austria, on 19 September.

While Rolls-Royce's snake-like mechanism is under wraps - pending patent filings - its aim is to have the robot carry far more than a camera. A UV laser would make the edges of blade fractures fluoresce, and a miniature grinding tool could sand down a compressor blade damaged by bird corpse debris or stones sucked into an engine, for example. The main challenge is beating gravity, says Rob Buckingham, managing director of OC Robotics in Filton, UK, a pioneer in industrial snake-like robots. The longer the snake, he says, the more likely it is to become droopy and hard to control at its far end.

The thinnest snake robot that OC robotics have developed is just 12.5 millimetres wide - pretty close to what Rolls-Royce is aiming for - but it is only 60 centimetres long. Buckingham doubts that kind of length will be of great utility in a jet engine. "The more joints you add, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the curviness," he says.

Rolls-Royce is also developing robust camera chips that can be installed around the engine's 2000 ?C core. The idea is that on engine shutdown, certain of the cameras in this interior CCTV network can be activated remotely by staff at Rolls-Royce's operations centre to give an instant picture if algorithms have suggested damage - before even the snake robot gets a look in.

"These cameras won't have to operate at engine temperatures - just survive them," says Emmott. "So we're going to need some interesting ways to keep them cool."

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