Mubasher: Rolls-Royce announced plans to develop robotic bugs that would enable it to detect and fix problems in aircraft engines.

The “cockroach” robots would improve the maintenance process by accelerating inspections without the need to uninstall an engine from an aircraft to carry out repairs, the engine manufacturer said in a statement.

“They could go off scuttling around reaching all different parts of the combustion chamber,” Rolls-Royce technology specialist James Kell said at the Farnborough International Airshow, adding that the tiny robots would save engineers a massive amount of time.

The UK-based firm joined forces with robotics specialists from Harvard University and the University of Nottingham to further develop the miniature technology.

We have been developing these robotic bugs for the past eight years, Harvard Institute research fellow Sebastian de Rivaz said, adding that the next upgrades would involve attaching cameras to the miniature robots and reducing their size to 15 millimetres (mm).

Once the robots accomplish their duty, they could either be programmed to leave the engine or be “flushed out” by the engine itself, de Rivaz noted.

Robotics experts are also developing “snake” robots with enough endoscopic flexibility to crawl through a combustion chamber, Rolls-Royce revealed, indicating that the snake robots could be used to inspect and remove any debris.