U.S. Air Force Integrates Robot Dogs and Drones for Enhanced Aircraft Inspections
The U.S. Air Force's Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex has awarded a Phase III contract to Asylon, a robotics company, to implement a system that combines drone technology with ground-based robotic dogs for general visual inspections of aircraft and weapon systems. The Multi-modal Autonomous Robotics for Inspection of Aircraft (MARIA) system utilizes Asylon’s Guardian sUAS drone system and its DroneDog quadrupedal robot. These robotic platforms work in unison to perform digital mapping of an entire aircraft using cameras and lidar. The collected inspection data is then fed into Asylon’s back-end software, which allows for programming inspection paths and ingesting the data. This technology aims to significantly improve the speed and safety of aircraft inspections, reducing processes that previously took days or weeks to a matter of hours. 
