Jet Engine MRO Robot: Spitfire Hangars to ABB Cells

A modern turbofan spends years on the wing, but sooner or later it goes into the shop for maintenance, repair and overhaul, the work the industry calls MRO. A shop visit can take months, and airlines are waiting longer than they used to. A jet engine MRO robot is meant to shorten that wait, mostly by inspecting blades and reshaping or polishing worn airfoils. This post follows engine overhaul from wartime piston engines to the first jet shops. Then it looks at what GE Aerospace and Rolls-Royce are doing with robots now, where ABB robots could fit, and what still holds automation back.

A Braathens Teknik employee inspects the fan of a CFM56 turbofan engine, 2004. Photo: J-C G / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How engines were stripped and rebuilt by hand

In the piston era, overhaul meant taking the engine apart. A photo from November 1942 shows a Spitfire Mark IX of No 64 Squadron, Royal Air Force, having its engine overhauled outside a blister hangar at Fairlop airfield in Essex. Ground crews did this kind of work with hand tools and gauges, opening the cowlings, changing parts and checking clearances. Larger overhauls were done in workshops away from the airfield, where engines were taken apart, inspected, rebuilt and tested before they returned to service.

A Spitfire Mark IX of No 64 Squadron undergoes an engine overhaul at Fairlop airfield, Essex, November 1942. Photo: Royal Air Force official photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Jet engines brought a new kind of part to look after: blades, hundreds of them. The earliest jets of the late 1930s used centrifugal compressors, and engineers soon moved to axial compressors with many rows of blades. In February 1955 a NACA researcher in Cleveland was photographed measuring the blades of a 12 stage axial flow compressor by hand. In service, a blade could be nicked by sand or birds, worn by heat or bent at the tip, and finding that damage usually meant opening the engine.

A NACA researcher measures the blades of a 12 stage axial flow compressor in Cleveland, 1955. Photo: NACA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Borescopes let inspectors look before they opened anything. In World War II, simple rigid borescopes were used to check the bores of large guns. Flexible fiberscopes later bent around corners into a combustion chamber without taking the engine apart, and video borescopes with a camera at the tip were widely available by about 2012. The repairs themselves were still done by hand. Worn compressor blades are reshaped by a process called blending, and at GE Aerospace's Singapore repair shop a technician told reporters in 2026 that, until now, the job had been 100 percent manual.

US Air Force sergeants clean and inspect the compressor blades of a T58 jet engine in Thailand, 1969. Photo: Sgt. Robert Wickley, U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Jet engine MRO robots in repair shops today

Rolls-Royce gave an early look at robots for this work. In 2018 it showed prototypes for its IntelligentEngine vision, developed with the University of Nottingham and Harvard University. SWARM was a set of tiny robots, about 10 mm across, that would crawl through an engine carrying cameras. FLARE was a pair of snake robots meant to patch thermal barrier coatings inside the combustion chamber while the engine stays on the wing. A third project, remote boreblending, would let a specialist blend a damaged blade from a distance through a borescope.

US Navy aviation machinist's mates fit a spinner cone to a P-8A engine during maintenance in Sigonella, Italy, 2020. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

GE Aerospace is putting robots into its shops. In September 2026 the Singapore Economic Development Board reported that GE Aerospace is investing USD 11 million to turn its Singapore engine repair site into a smart factory, with automated inspection, robotic polishing and adaptive machining of airfoils, and robotic re-profiling of blade leading edges. The work starts with high pressure compressor airfoils for GEnx engines, then CFM LEAP. Singapore handles more than 60 percent of GE Aerospace's global component repair volume, and the company aims to raise output there by 33 percent without adding floor space.

Propulsion technicians check their tools in front of a KC-135 engine at RAF Mildenhall, 2020. Photo: Airman 1st Class Joseph Barron, U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB is not named in these engine shop projects, though the tasks will look familiar to anyone who programs ABB robots. Its force control software keeps a constant pressure between tool and surface, which is how an IRB 6700 grinds steel parts in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. ABB's 3D Quality Inspection cell, 3DQI, mounts a 3D scanner on a robot and compares each scan with the part's CAD model. As a possibility, the same tools could polish or measure blades in an MRO shop, as our post on robot grinding and deburring explains.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robots in engine maintenance

The long term goal is to do more work without removing the engine at all. Snake robots and crawlers that inspect and patch from inside would save the cost of pulling an engine off the wing and shipping it to a shop. Inside the shop, AI that reads borescope video and 3D scans could decide which blades need repair and pass that list to a robot cell. GE says its first AI guided white light robot inspectors began checking high pressure turbine parts in the fall of 2024.

ABB's 3D Quality Inspection (3DQI) cell scanning a metal part. Photo: ABB

For repair cells, the hard part is that no two worn blades are the same. A robot has to scan each part, plan a path for the material that is actually there and then check its own result. ABB's Machining PowerPac in RobotStudio already plans grinding and polishing paths offline from CAD data, and a robot with force control could follow such paths on a worn blade, as a possibility for MRO shops. Repairs like this are close cousins of the metal deposition work in our post on laser cladding.

A V2500 high pressure turbine guide vane after the repair process developed by MTU, shown at a trade fair, 2013. Photo: Olivier Cleynen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Approval is the biggest brake. Every engine repair has to follow approved methods and quality checks, so a new robot process needs a lot of evidence before it can touch a part that will fly. Repair cells are also expensive, and engine models keep changing. Skills may be the hardest part of all. GE is asking experienced technicians to teach their feel for blending to robots, and shops will need people who can program and validate those cells and keep them running for years.

The 3D scanner head mounted on an ABB robot in the 3DQI cell. Photo: ABB

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