In the automotive industry, life is pretty easy for the car-assembling robots … they just sit in the same place performing the same task, day after day. Things are different in the aerospace industry, however. Airplanes aren’t made on assembly lines, so any robots used in their construction would have to move around them. The member organizations of the European VALERI Project (Validation of Advanced, Collaborative Robotics for Industrial Applications) are now working on making such mobile, autonomous plane-building robots a reality…

Carnegie Mellon University, incidentally, has already developed robots for stripping paint off of aircraft, although their designers believe that they could also be used for performing inspections and repairs.
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