Airborne and Plataine partnering for automated composites kitting solution

By integrating Plataine’s cut plan optimization solution into Airborne’s automated kitting system, composite material utilization can be optimized to its ultimate limits resulting in minimized material waste and optimized factory logistics. 

Airborne and Plataine officially sealed their partnership during the JEC World 2018.

Minimize waste and optimize factory logistics
Last year Airborne as one of the first companies worldwide, introduced a fully automated kitting solution. Airborne and Plataine emphasize the further development of automated composites kitting solution by joining forces.

One of the key advantages of an automated kitting system is that it can facilitate the use of Plataine’s strong expertise in the field of digitizing and optimizing complex manufacturing processes using AI-based algorithms that create optimized cut-plans (nesting), with the ability to mix product plies using the same raw material, and create an integrated method for dynamic nesting. Adopting these strategies to minimize material waste and optimize factory logistics, comes to its fullest extent when integrated into Airborne robust hardware solution for automated kitting. The new partnership displays the ultimate example of system optimization by perfectly aligning hardware and software. 

Plataine and Airborne collaboration combines Plataine’s software and Airborne‘s automated equipment, allowing manufacturers to take part mixing to the extreme, thanks to the Airborne automated robotic cell that can handle the complex sorting and kitting. This ensures optimal material utilization, shorter production cycles and rapid time to market.

Integrating software and hardware

“Combining Airborne’s and Plataine’s unique and complementary technologies enables ultimate nesting and material utilization for composite materials. For our customers, this will result in double digit material cost reductions”, said Arno van Mourik, CEO Airborne. 

Avner Ben-Bassat, President & CEO at Plataine said: “The Airborne-Plataine partnership will be a real game changer allowing composites part manufacturers to enter many more applications than currently being used, overcoming the limitation of human operators to sort and retrieve the plies from the cutting table when dealing with highly mixed cut-plans”.