(Divergent: Los Angeles; Saab: Linköping, Sweden) -- Divergent Technologies Inc. and Saab announced the initial delivery of fuselages for a Saab future product concept of an autonomous aircraft.

The fuselages, designed and manufactured by Saab and Divergent, were developed and built with no unique tooling or fixturing. Instead, Divergent’s fully digital, software-defined manufacturing assets were utilized. 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, and feature higher performance and lower cost than their conventionally designed and manufactured alternatives.

Watch: Saab x Divergent—Creating Hardware as Software—Intro (YouTube).

These will be among the largest laser powder-bed fusion structures to ever undergo powered flight, marking both a significant technical achievement and demonstrating the absolute scale of Divergent’s fixtureless assembly technology. The full structure stretches 15 ft long and comprises 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,” says 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.”

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