Today, Divergent Technologies, Inc. and Saab announced the delivery of initial fuselages for a Saab future product concept of an autonomous aircraft.

The fuselage, jointly designed and manufactured by Saab and Divergent, was developed and realized with no unique tooling or fixturing, instead utilizing Divergent's fully digital, software-defined manufacturing assets. The Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS) is an end-to-end structural engineering design and manufacturing system leveraging AI-driven design, industrial-rate additive manufacturing, and universal robotic assembly to deliver structures that are faster to develop, higher performance, and lower cost than their conventionally designed and manufactured alternatives.

The structure will be amongst the largest laser powder bed fusion structures to ever undergo powered flight, marking both a significant technical achievement in demonstrating the absolute scale of Divergent's fixtureless assembly technology while highlighting the continued expansion of Divergent's capabilities to ever more demanding applications. The full structure stretched 15 feet in length and comprised 26 unique printed parts, each joined and bonded in the company's fixtureless robotic assembly cell.

"This collaboration with Saab highlights what becomes possible when ambitious aircraft concepts are paired with an end-to-end, software-defined manufacturing platform," said Lukas Czinger, Co-founder and CEO of Divergent. "By tightly integrating digital design, additive manufacturing, and automated assembly, our teams were able to realize a large-scale fuselage structure aligned with Saab's vision, while moving with a level of speed, flexibility, and structural integration that traditional approaches cannot match."

"Adopting Divergent's additively manufactured and digitally designed structures in this effort has given our joint team unparalleled flexibility in this development process," said Axel Bååthe, head of Saab's Rainforest. "We see digital design and advanced manufacturing as a key enabler of our collaborative success in this project."