Airbus is one of the most recognizable brands worldwide - and that’s mainly for their innovation in aircraft manufacturing. Things got very exciting for us when Airbus together with other leaders from the aviation and robotics sector start building smart robots to perform all kinds of operations around aircrafts - and calls for our help to explain how they work.

Our reaction? Nothing more exciting than explaining a well-done piece of hardware equipped with intelligent sensors! And here’s the story behind one of our favourite 3D animation videos - ever.

The Challenge

The AirCobot is a complex, intelligent, collaborative robot produced by Airbus in collaboration with leaders from the robotics research field. It’s a real game-changer in the industry, as it replaces old (and established) procedures related to aircraft inspections with new automatized ones. In order to persuade the industry to adapt this innovation, the makers of AirCobot need to:

• Explain how the robot works
• Persuade that it is a better solution than the current one (manual aircraft inspections)
• Be open and invite business partners to discover the benefits.

Despite the fact that the robot is a technical innovation, the the target group of the communication campaign are non technical staff, mainly represented by procurement and managerial staff, so our goal was to “make it simple” - create a video about a robot, and make it understandable for all humans. 

From storyboard to Illustrations for the AirCobot video 

Messaging and visual strategies for the explainer video

The solution was to re-engineer the communication around the AirCobot robot: instead of describing the features of the robot (typical engineering talk), we identified benefits which are really easy to understand for everyone who works in air travel, aircraft management and maintenance etc. We identified 3 main benefits:

• Faster inspections and shorter aircraft downtime
• Reduced maintenance cost
• Repeatable precision of computerised, automated inspection.

 

 

Visualising the benefits of smart automated robots for aircraft inspections

 

In the visual layer, we wanted to convey the message that the robot is an enhancing innovation, as it works alongside humans (e.g. co-pilots and maintenance staff) and a collaborative one (human inspectors must confirm the diagnose done by AirCobot).

Also, we used a digitalisation strategy, to change the perception of AirCobot from a heavy steel robot into lighter and smarter player, which generates a bigger likelihood that the viewers want to adopt the innovation.

Visualising the benefits of smart automated robots for aircraft inspections

 

Finally, rich 3D visualisations and cool transitions were used to stimulate positive emotions around the video throughout its running time.