Airborne introduces automated kitting solutions

At AIRTEC 2017,  the aerospace supply chain trade show held October 24-26 in Munich, Germany,  composites specialist Airborne (The Hague, Netherlands) presented the latest developments on its Automated Kitting Solutions.  Airborne says it is one of the first companies worldwide to have developed a fully automated manufacturing process for picking, sorting and placing of composite plies, a solution that can be fully integrated into a composite cutting machine thus reducing cost and time to convert composite rolls into a sorted kit. The première of the company’s solution was October 24th, when CTO Marcus Kremers presents a video showing the kitting for the first time.

As composite “buy-to-fly” ratios and material efficiency are playing a dominant role with regard to pricing of composite components, more and more advanced nesting software and cutting machines have been developed and are currently being used, says Airborne. The backside of this development is that sorting and kitting of cut composite plies is getting more and more complex and has become a real labor-intensive activity, and in some cases is the key driver when it comes to clean room efficiencies. These challenges have been conquered by Airborne through the development of their Automated Kitting Solutions.

Depending on the clients’ requirements Airborne’s solution can either be fully
integrated into the clients’ existing cutting machines and nesting software or be placed as a plug-and-play, standalone solution parallel to a cutting machine using Vison Machine.
Says Kremers, "Automated kitting is affordable, flexible and very easy to use. It is one of
our building blocks for automation of composites and already fully digital. If you see it, you wonder why it has not been developed before!”

Airborne is able to provide fully integrated solutions, standalone solutions and sorted or unsorted kits. To showcase their latest development, Airborne’s CTO Marcus Kremers explains the process in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5KCVDRc8dc.