A Boeing story that doesn’t involve a horrific tragedy (yet — hedging my bets here). Also — a (small) in your face robot overlords! The title in the on-line article is more stinging — Boeing abandons its failed fuselage robots on the 777X, handing the job back to machinists.
After enduring a manufacturing mess that spanned six years and cost millions of dollars as it implemented a large-scale robotic system for automated assembly of the 777 fuselage, Boeing has abandoned the robots and will go back to relying more on its human machinists.
The system being canned is the “Fuselage Automated Upright Build” (FAUB) process, a (almost) fully automated system in which the fuselage sections are positioned in a cradle and moving robots drill and install fasteners to stitch the sections together. It was introduced gradually starting in 2015 (I guess the 6 years probably includes the time to design and build FAUB itself) at Boeing’s Everett site. Early results were “inauspicious” — the robots were hard to set up and error-prone in operation, producing damaged fuselages and incomplete assemblies requiring had finishing.
In 2016 the Seattle Times got a couple of comments from 777 assembly line workers about FAUB being “a horrible failure” and “a nightmare”. Boeing brushed the reports off, with the VP of 777/777X operations saying:
“It’s a little tough in the teething,” Jason Clark, Boeing vice president of 777/777X operations, said then. “But as we get through it, it will create the rewards necessary for us to compete.”
Oh, well… Yesterday Boeing made the announcement yesterday that they were scrapping the technology and going back to their older “flex track” system, a small, mobile robot that runs on rails attached to the fuselage to drill holes. The machinists then manually insert and finish the fasteners (rivets).
The story also notes that the FAUB was used for the forward and rear fuselage sections. The more complex mid-fuselage section that included the wing box and wing stubs used a different technique and two sided fasteners instead of rivets. (Robot drills and inserts, machinists finish with collars that lock the fasteners in place.) Other parts of the assembly process are still highly automated — including the carbon composite wing fabrication and assembly.