MADS × Atlas Copco — 1st Semester MFA, 10 Weeks  ·  Red Dot Award 2019

One million holes.
No drilling
templates.

MADS — More Advanced Drilling System — is an autonomous drilling unit that attaches to a flexible rail on an aircraft fuselage, scans existing reference holes using photogrammetry, and drills the remaining million to spec without a single jig. Developed in collaboration with Atlas Copco as a first-semester MFA project at Umeå University's Advanced Product Design Programme.

Role

Industrial Designer
Single Project

Focus

Concept, Form Development
& Model Making

Output

Red Dot Award 2019,
renders & physical model

Research

Visiting Airbus in Hamburg and
Atlas Copco in Nacka.

--When joining aircraft fuselage segments, up to one million holes must be drilled — each meeting strict standards for position, diameter and perpendicularity. Today this is done using heavy metal drilling templates called jigs. Each jig is custom-made for a single location on a single aircraft type, weighs up to 50 kg, must be repositioned for every hole, and represents a significant financial investment. The system is costly, inflexible and brutal on the people operating it.

The problem

Up to 50 kg of template.
One operator. Worst
possible position.

When joining aircraft fuselage segments, up to one million holes must be drilled — each meeting strict standards for position, diameter and perpendicularity. Today this is done using heavy metal drilling templates called jigs. Each jig is custom-made for a single location on a single aircraft type, weighs up to 50 kg, must be repositioned for every hole, and represents a significant financial investment. The system is costly, inflexible and brutal on the people operating it.

Current drilling template process — field photos

Four compounding problems: weight, cost, constant repositioning and zero flexibility — a different jig for every single spot on the plane.

Benchmark

Two technologies
that pointed the way.

Before generating ideas I mapped existing solutions. Two stood out as direct inspiration: the Flex Track — a large autonomous drilling system that moves on flexible rails along the fuselage exterior — and the Shaper Router, a handheld routing tool with a built-in screen that displays the correct path while its bit auto-corrects for positioning errors. Both contained a key insight worth combining: rail-based autonomy and position self-correction.

Benchmark — Shaper Router handheld tool

Shaper Origin - Handheld CNC router.

Benchmark — Flex Track autonomous drilling system

Flextrack - exterior drilling system.

Concept

A portable autonomous
system that finds its
own position.

MADS clips onto a lightweight flexible rail that runs along the fuselage. Once attached, it uses photogrammetry cameras to scan existing pre-drilled reference holes, cross-references their positions against the aircraft's 3D CAD data, and calculates exactly where every remaining hole needs to go. The operator doesn't need to position anything precisely — MADS handles that itself. The human sets it up, the machine does the rest.

Replacing drill templates with a portable, autonomous drilling system — one that positions itself using photogrammetry and the plane's own CAD data.

Package

Every component
earns its place.

--Defining the needed components to make the system work.

Positioning

1½D movement.
Virtual template.

MADS moves in one linear axis along the rail, while a swivelling arm extends its reach to cover all holes within a defined lateral distance — a 1½D kinematic that keeps the system simple and reliable. The drill spindle includes a tilt mechanism using two eccentric pivots (borrowed directly from the Shaper tool concept) that keeps the bit perpendicular to the curved fuselage surface at every position, regardless of the local contour.

Benchmark — Shaper Router handheld tool

Linear movement with swivelling spindle.

Benchmark — Flex Track autonomous drilling system

Tilting mechanism to adjust perpendicularity.

Usage

Just zip it.

The installation process was designed to feel satisfying and require almost no skill. The operator pulls the guide rail off its transport trolley, zips MADS onto the rail in one motion, and the system takes over. No calibration ritual. No template alignment. The goal was to reduce the required skill while adding an element of coolness and physicality to a process that had been purely tedious.

Form development

Let the mechanism
write the shape.

The form was not applied to the function — it grew from it. The two eccentric pivot points, the drill spindle and the main body pivot already define a silhouette. I preserved and emphasised that geometry rather than covering it, then added technical surface details that make the internal logic legible from the outside. The result is a shape that looks exactly like what it does.

Form development — ideation sketches and evolution

Final design

Simple & technical.
Atlas Copco quality.

The final MADS uses a continuous flexible track rather than the segmented one from the mock-up phase — better conformability to fuselage curvature, cleaner silhouette. The CMF was refined significantly to meet Atlas Copco's premium industrial standard: a dark structural body, yellow accent details on all operator-touch points, and a matte finish that reads as precision equipment rather than prototype.

Final design — MADS in context with operator silhouette
Final design — side view render on flexible track

The final CMF — dark body, yellow operator touch-points, precision matte finish — positions MADS firmly within Atlas Copco's high-end industrial tool range.

Model making

Physical model.
Real material decisions.

A physical scale model was built to validate the form, proportion and CMF decisions made in CAD. Working in three dimensions exposed details that renders had hidden — the weight distribution of the swivel arm, the ergonomics of the operator grip zones and the visual balance of the track-to-body ratio. The model became the primary presentation object for the project review.

MADS — 1.5D movement and swivel arm reach
Tilt mechanism — eccentric pivot diagram

MADS was developed over ten weeks as a first-semester single project at Umeå University's Advanced Product Design Programme, in collaboration with Atlas Copco. The project was awarded the Red Dot Design Award 2019.