Dutch Applied AI Award 2023 to KLM, Mainblades and KPN

An aircraft on the ground does not make money. KLM is therefore constantly looking for ways to make maintenance more efficient. "Together with Mainblades, we have developed an automatic drone system that works for every aircraft type," says Mr. K. Thunderstorm inspections are the first concrete application. "The drone autonomously flies past the aircraft, takes pictures and displays them on an iPad. Then an AI system looks for possible damage. With this, we reduce the inspection time to one to two hours."

 

The jury of the Dutch Applied AI Award is enthusiastic about the application. "The collaborating partners have created a working system that brings together three technologies: communication, automated data collection with drones and image recognition of, in this case, hairline cracks in aircraft walls," explains jury chair Nanda Piersma. She is the scientific director of the Centre of Expertise Applied Artificial Intelligence at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, one of the initiators of the award alongside podcast De Dataloog and Computable. "Worldwide, this has not been applied like this before. The parties have already achieved a great result by reducing the inspection time of an aircraft to two hours.