Autonomous tarmac inspection
Airside tarmacs are some of the most time-pressured, safety-critical environments in commercial aviation. A global airline needed a robot that could actually work there, without getting in the way.
Problem
Active tarmacs combine high-value equipment, tight turnaround windows, and dense human traffic — ground crews, tugs, catering, fuel trucks. Introducing an autonomous system into that environment means the robot cannot only be technically capable: it has to fit the operational rhythm, respect safety envelopes, and produce inspection data a maintenance organization will actually act on. Off-the-shelf AMRs were not designed for outdoor weather or human-in-the-loop live airside work.
Approach
Led a multi-year program to design and deploy an autonomous mobile robot into live tarmac operations. Scope spans technician manipulation tasks, on-ramp manipulation tasks, and autonomous navigation across the airside platform, with surface cleaning as a smaller adjacent workstream. Owned the whole-machine design: chassis, sensing, navigation stack, and the manipulation interface. Built AI-driven inspection and navigation workflows around a human-in-the-loop architecture so operators can refine behavior continuously in production.
Outcome
- Live deployment in active airside operations with continuous refinement in production
- Established the airline’s first production autonomous tarmac robotics program
- TODO: verify metric — number of inspections / uptime hours / defect catch rate
- TODO: verify metric — fleet size in deployment