“Hunter-Killers. Patrol machines. Built in automated factories.” The phrase is pronounced Kyle Reese in ‘Terminator‘, when trying to explain a future dominated by Skynet and its war machines. Forty years later, we are not in that science fiction nightmare, but the connection is too powerful to ignore: China is manufacturing structural components for stealth fighters in a highly automated plant, with almost no humans on the line and with machinery capable of working for much of the day.
Turn off the light. The news comes through Science and Technology Daily. According to that source, the factory has more than doubled efficiency in the production of structural components for Chinese stealth fighters, including the J-20. The process, which previously required employees monitoring operations around the clock, now relies on autonomous vehicles, automated machinery guided by AI and systems capable of sustaining activity for almost 24 hours. Of course: we are not talking about complete planes leaving a ship alone, but rather about the manufacturing of the “skeleton” of the aircraft under conditions of very reduced human intervention.
What is a dark factory. We are talking about facilities designed to operate with very little human presence, to the point that lighting is no longer a necessary condition for production. Siemens describes these plants as facilities with minimal human activity, capable of operating in the dark. We can see this idea applied to a variety of sectors: steel, mobile phones, domestic engines, and rocket ignition device parts.
A complex product. The plant combines autonomous material transportation, high-precision machining, intelligent scanning and robotic inspection. Previously, however, it took two or three employees per shift to keep the machinery running all day, but now the human labor hours needed to operate the plant have been reduced by more than 80%.
A factory that learns to speak. The leap did not depend solely on installing more robots. As Song Ge, head of digital manufacturing, explained to Science and Technology Daily, the dozens of machines in the plant used different protocols and software languages, a fragmentation that made it difficult to unify the line and control it as a system. The solution was to ensure that the equipment could communicate, be controlled remotely and coordinated within the same production flow.
The plane behind the factory. The J-20 occupies a central place in Chinese air modernization. The Chinese Ministry of Defense confirmed in 2018 its entry into combat service and presented it as a fighter with the capacity to contest air superiority, carry out precision attacks against land and maritime targets, electronic interference and tactical command.
An old dream with new machinery. The idea of manufacturing almost without humans was not born with China or with the J-20. CNN recalled in 2003 That dream already came from the eighties, when General Motors imagined robots so reliable that they could assemble transmissions in the dark. That collided with a much clumsier reality: the machines did not work well even with the lights on. Today the map is broader: FANUC has operated a dark factory in Japan since 2001, Makuta Micro Molding applies that model in the United States to microinjection molding and Philips has produced electric clippers in the Netherlands with a highly automated unit supported by hundreds of robots.
Looking to the future. The industrial future does not have to look like Skynet, but it does point to factories where human presence weighs less in certain production phases. And when that happens, keeping the lights on throughout the entire operation stops being a productive necessity and becomes dependent on when people enter the plant.
Images | Chinese Ministry of Defense
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