Advanced manufacturing company Machina Labs (Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.) has been awarded $1.6 million by the U.S. Air Force (USAF, Washington, D.C., U.S.) to advance and accelerate the development of its robotic technology for manufacturing of metal tooling for high-rate production of composites.

Higher vehicle production rates in comparison to current rates is anticipated as experts project that the airline industry will need to triple its fleet to about 60,000 airplanes over the next 20 years. With respect to military applications, there is a similar drive towards balancing mission agility, sustainment and vehicle cost — this has been giving rise to emerging air vehicle concepts like the low-cost autonomous collaborative platforms (ACP) program where there is a higher tolerance over limited life and loss of vehicles during operations.

“We are pleased to advance our work with USAF in order to advance composite tooling for a wide variety of applications,” Babak Raeisinia, co-founder and head of applications and partnerships at Machina Labs, says. “Keeping inventory of tooling is expensive. I believe technology will free up capital and allow organizations such as USAF to transition to an on-demand tooling model.”