Tachoblog

This isn’t some ‘funny’ accident picture and it certainly isn’t a new aircraft, this is Taxibot from Ricardo.

When an aircraft taxis to and fro between the airport terminal gate and the runway, it currently has to use its main jets to do so.  As you can imagine, this is a highly inefficient use of them and causes air & noise pollution as well as wasted fuel and hence increased carbon emissions.

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According to IAI and Airbus, Taxiing at airports using the aircrafts’ main engines results in a huge consumption of fuel (forecasted to cost around $7bn by 2012), a large emission of CO2 (approximately 18m tonnes per year), and a significant source of foreign object debris damage (costing around $350m per year).

Ricardo has successfully engineered and delivered a demonstrator robotic, pilot-controlled towing vehicle known as ‘TaxiBot’ for Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). The TaxiBot concept is capable of operating with both wide and narrow bodied commercial airliners; it requires no modification to the aircraft, taxiways or runways, and only minor changes to airport infrastructure.

In simple terms, the aircraft’s nose wheel is locked into the Taxibot and clever technology then lets the pilot use the Taxibot as a tug to pull the plane around using none of it’s own power.  Thanks to a freely rotating turret on Taxibot, it can take steering and braking requests directly from the nose wheel in such a way that the pilot should not notice the presence of the tug whilst being towed normally by TaxiBot.

A crucial aspect of the TaxiBot design is that the aircraft brakes slow the aircraft down, not the tug. This, coupled with the management of the nose landing gear forces makes operational towing possible. With the TaxiBot engaged the flight crew can manoeuvre the aircraft around the taxi-ways of the airport, relying solely on auxiliary power units for on-board power and air conditioning needs.

The first TaxiBot vehicle – the full size, fully operational demonstrator (the white thing you can see above!) – is based on a Krauss Maffei PTS-1 aircraft towbarless tractor originally owned by Lufthansa LEOS. This donor vehicle has been heavily redesigned, modified and rebuilt by Ricardo and the resulting now six-wheeled vehicle is capable of towing Boeing 747 and Airbus A340 airliners.

The demonstrator vehicle weighs 52 tonnes and is powered by twin, 500hp V8 diesel engines which operate a complex hydrostatic drive system as well as hydraulic systems handling the 4-wheel steering and aircraft pick-up and clamp actuators.

To test the TaxiBot prototype demonstrator vehicle, Ricardo has designed and built, in parallel with the vehicle programme, a 100 tonne test trailer equipped with a hydrostatic dynamometer capable of simulating large passenger aircraft tyre drag – that’s the yellow thing in our picture!  The test trailer is designed with a genuine Boeing 747 cockpit and nose landing gear in order to fully replicate the processes both of towing and flight deck control of the tug. This highly flexible test trailer has enabled extensive testing of the prototype TaxiBot vehicle to be carried out by Ricardo at the Dunsfold aerodrome close to London, UK.

Following signature of the Memorandum of Understanding between IAI and Airbus Industries on future development of TaxiBot at the 2009 Paris Air Show, and subsequent Memorandum of Agreement with TLD, development tests are continuing to be carried out by Ricardo using the demonstrator TaxiBot vehicle and test trailer at Dunsfold. Once this testing is completed it is planned that the demonstrator vehicle will be shipped to Toulouse airport where the TaxiBot will be used in further tests in February 2010 with an Airbus owned A340-600 airplane weighing approximately 350 tonnes. The Ricardo team on the TaxiBot programme will continue to support the development work throughout this next phase based at Toulouse.