Researchers in the UAE are using advanced technology to bolster flight safety procedures in an industry responsible for putting tens of millions of passengers into the skies every year.
A team at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi have developed a cutting-edge method to make inspections of crucial aircraft components 10 times faster – without compromising safety.
Aeroplane parts must meet stringent standards to be passed fit to fly and such checks can, understandably, be painstaking.
Prof Yahya Zweiri and colleagues, who work in the university's Advanced Research and Innovation Centre, have developed new technology for the inspection of countersinks, which are the holes for rivets, bolts or screws.
Safety in focus
To ensure precise fitting and structural integrity, a single aeroplane part can contain thousands of countersinks, each of which must be created to a precise size that varies by less than a fraction of a millimetre.
Traditional inspection processes involve a camera moving along a line of countersinks and pausing at each inspection point to capture and process the image. The pause is needed to ensure the images are not blurred.
The method developed at Khalifa University, which uses what researchers call “event-based algorithms”, eliminates the need for this pause, so the camera can move continuously throughout the inspections.
“Our research makes a real impact; we are not conducting it just to produce papers that sit on shelves or in archives,” Prof Zweiri told The National. “Our research goal is to make a meaningful impact on the industry, contribute to the knowledge-based economy and deliver high-tech solutions that address real-world challenges.”
The Advanced Research and Innovation Centre is a joint project between the university and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign investment fund, bridging the gap between academia and industry. Over the past two years, four industrial solutions have been deployed on factory shop floors and 10 patents submitted.
The new inspection technology involves neuromorphic computing, in which the computers processing the camera images are designed to resemble the structure and function of the human brain.
Rather than considering every pixel recorded by the camera, the computer’s visual analyser looks at only those pixels where the light intensity is changing above a certain level. These pixels are in the sections of the image that are critical for inspecting the countersink.
“If you observe the motion within the scene, only a few pixels show light-intensity changes that exceed the threshold. These are the ones you process, while the majority remain passive and are discarded,” Prof Zweiri said.
Efficiency drive
This method results in huge reductions in the amount of data that needs to be processed, allowing the camera to move faster and without stopping. It is still, however, able to measure countersinks to an accuracy of 0.026mm, or less than one thirtieth of a millimetre.
This type of attention to detail has helped the aviation industry to massively improve its safety record in recent decades. Extensive training, regulation and safety management systems are also credited with reducing accident rates.
According to research released in August by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), between 1968 and 1977 the risk of any individual dying was one per 350,000 commercial flight boardings. Between 2018 and 2022, it was one per 13.7 million boardings – a 39-fold improvement on the 1968 to 1977 figure.
“You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below, and yet the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about seven per cent annually,” Arnold Barnett, an MIT professor of statistics, said in comments recently published by the institution.
The critical importance of maintaining safety standards, however, has been highlighted by the challenges facing the beleaguered aviation giant, Boeing. The US-based company has come under fire in recent months over a string of crises related to the safety of its aircraft and its manufacturing process.
For the inspections that Prof Zweiri and his colleagues work on, there is normally a trade-off between precision and speed, he said. “To do high precision, you need low speed, and vice versa,” he said. However, he added, the new technology allowed high speed within the “stringent” precision requirements of the aviation industry.
The neuromorphic technology can also carry out inspections at much lower light levels, which reduces the energy requirements. It has already been deployed at Strata, the Al Ain-based aviation manufacturer owned by Mubadala.
Prof Zweiri said that because the precision standards of the aviation industry are so high, the technology meets or exceeds the requirements of other sectors.
“Once you penetrate this type of industry, it’s easy for you to commercialise your solutions for other types of industries, like automotive, which is to a certain degree less stringent than the aviation industry,” he said.
Prof Zweiri and his team – which include postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and undergraduates – are advancing research on neuromorphic technology, which mimics the human nervous system. Their focus is on replicating touch, aiming to create systems that can perceive and respond to tactile stimuli similarly to human skin.
This research, Prof Zweiri said, has wide-ranging applications, including robotics, prosthetics and artificial intelligence, where enhanced sensitivity and responsiveness to physical environments are crucial.
