Watch Boeing's High-Speed Painting Robots in Action

Boeing is using robots to help speed the production of its 777 commercial aircraft at an assembly plant in Washington state.

The Seattle Times reports that two robots now help paint Boeing 777 wings at the aerospace company's assembly plant in Everett, Wash. What normally takes a human team 4.5 hours to paint the first coat, the robots can complete in only 24 minutes.

It's a robotic system called the "Automated Spray Method" or ASM. Boeing says the robots take care of washing, priming and painting the wings, as the wings are horizontally held in place. Human employees still have to press a few buttons, as well as load/unload paint, mask the wings and service the robots.

This automation is also improving the overall paint job.

"The robot has two different guns on it and will apply two different paints at two different thicknesses, simultaneously together in as seamless operation so you won’t see the two different coatings,” ASM Implementation Manager Ken Brewer said in a Boeing feature story.

The Boeing 777 is among the world's most popular commercial airplanes and the company now builds 100 of them per year.

But even though the robots have take over what was previously manual labor, a Boeing director told The Seattle Times that no layoffs happened because of this new technology. Unlike car makers who may have moved toward more automation, airplane manufacturing can still involve significant human labor.

“We’re 90 percent manual,” Jason Clark, director of 777 manufacturing, told The Seattle Times.

Half of the human wing-painting team have been reshuffled to other roles, Clark told the newspaper.

Clark told the Times that the inspiration behind all this was from seeing the amount of automation at a BMW factory in Munich, Germany.

Check out the painting robots in action in this video below, courtesy of Boeing: