Field robotics R&D

An active outdoor industrial environment is one of the harder places to put a working robot. A global airline wanted ones that could earn their place there, in the conditions where you’d rather not send people.

Problem

Active outdoor operations at commercial-aviation scale combine high-value equipment, strict turnaround windows, dense human traffic, and weather that doesn’t care about your sensor stack. A lot of the inspection work that has to happen out there happens in conditions that aren’t great for people: bad weather, low light, slick surfaces, long hours. Off-the-shelf autonomous mobile robots aren’t built for that environment, and the operational rhythm leaves zero room for a robot that gets in the way.

Approach

Led a multi-year applied R&D effort to design and field-test autonomous mobile robots that can do inspection work in active outdoor environments alongside ground crews. Owned the whole-machine design (chassis, sensing suite, navigation stack) and the inspection workflow built around a human-in-the-loop control layer, so operators can refine behavior continuously during field testing rather than re-training from scratch. Scope spans multiple use cases on the same outdoor platform; the deeper problem is the environment, not any single task.

Outcome

• Field-tested in active outdoor operations alongside live ground crews
• Continuous human-in-the-loop refinement across multiple use cases and seasons
• Reusable platform and operational pattern carrying across the broader applied R&D effort
• The work people would rather not do in bad weather is increasingly the work the robot does