CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N192-134

Description

Effective maintenance enables the Marines to rapidly respond to challenging operations by ensuring functional and ready equipment. However, these activities demand significant training and skills in order to be efficient and competent execution and to ensure operational readiness. This requires extensive general and specialized knowledge. A limited number of expert technicians have extensive knowledge breadth and depth, and they cannot scale to fully cover all maintenance activities or provide on-site support to less experienced technicians. To address these issues, we propose to design and demonstrate a System with Augmented Maintenance and Training User Interfaces across Remote Networks (SATURN). As part of this effort, we will develop a remote support work environment that enables effective bidirectional communication and interactions between on-site maintenance personnel and a remote expert. SATURN also provides heads-up and hands-free augmented reality-based human machine interfaces that are appropriate to the maintenance operational context, and a data collection framework that will inform future training and maintenance execution. Combined, SATURN will enable effective remote maintenance support operations across connected and disconnected environments along with novel heads-up and hands-free human machine interfaces to support on-site maintenance personnel.