The Department of the Navy sustainment community is urgently working to reliably and safely return assets to the field as quickly as possible. 3D scanning, including both digitization and rendering, is an emerging capability with the ability to autonomously 3D scan large platforms with the high precision to improve asset digital twins and locate maintenance issues that may otherwise by difficult to discern. FTLs DADTMA (Distributed Acquisition Digital Twin Maintenance Architecture) is an adaptable digitization, knowledge capture, and expert system for identifying and tracking maintenance needs before they become expensive or dangerous problems. DADTMA provides rapid, hand-held, photogrammetric digitization with precision that scales gracefully with range and speed, and provides a digital twin framework that unifies many data types. Automated landmark identification algorithms and AI object recognition networks continue to work on the data at the database level, resulting in a virtualized asset that has resolution where it is needed, large spatial extent in other areas, and a semantic layer of maintenance history and metadata that unifies large digital data sets in the service of asset sustainment.
Benefit: There is currently an urgent need for Digital Process Inspection and repair technologies in civilian and military asset sustainment environments. As asset assembly and repair becomes increasingly complicated with sophisticated work instructions delivered by a variety of digital methods, this process complexity drives corresponding complexity in the requirements of lifecycle assurance processes, including the use of scanning technologies to capture geometric variability and automated workflow management to annotate process completion. FTL's digital inspection technologies represent a robust and adaptable observation and knowledge capture system for monitoring the construction environment that have been developed with direct input from commercial aerospace manufacturers Lockheed-Martin (Sikorsky), and Northrop Grumman. FTLs technology is capable of recognizing potential maintenance situations and providing notification to the operator or quality assurance stakeholder, and store disparate fabrication data elements and be integrated with automated delivery of work instructions. The proposed technology, when implemented, will allow a significant enhancement in vehicle lifecycle management. In addition to this important application to the U.S. Department of Defense and civilian aerospace markets, additional large-scale manufacturing, such as for medical devices and silicon chips, may arise as a significant market for the resultant technologies. The aerospace & life sciences Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) market is expected to grow from $30.45 billion in 2017 to $41.60 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 5.34% between 2017 and 2023. Northrop Grumman told FTL directly that a 10% time-reduction in inspections converts to a $10M savings in lifecycle costs over the lifetime of a single product. FTLs technology has significant advantages that will make it competitive in this sector.
Keywords: maintenance, maintenance, Sensors, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital twin, sustainment, Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), Machine Learning (ML), DADTMA (Distributed Acquisition Digital Twin Maintenance Architecture)
