As robotic accuracies and capabilities improve, robots find more applications in aerospace/defense manufacturing. Faced with increased demands to meet large order backlogs, aerospace and defense manufacturers are taking a page from automotive builders' playbooks in using advanced robotics and other automation tools to help boost aircraft build rates and improve aerospace factory efficiencies. Long the nearly exclusive domain of automotive, robotic automation increasingly is being deployed in key aerospace/defense and commercial aircraft for drilling, fastening, painting, coating, and welding applications as manufacturing engineers borrow from automotive processes for aerospace automation. With more orders for military aircraft and large commercial aircraft such as the Boeing Co.'s (Chicago) 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus 380, aerospace builders are under pressure to automate the process of drilling thousands of holes in each plane.
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