Materials Technologies Corporation — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N201-008

Description

The wiring infrastructure inside an in-service aircraft (and ship and sub alike) – is a confluence of three realities: (i) As-designed layout, (ii) As-built variant, and (iii) As-it is after inspection, maintenance, repair, and overhaul (IMRO). These realities lead to two actions: (a) Start of Information Forward Flow Deviation (IFFD):  During aircraft assembly, the harness installers take a “practical” approach in deviating from the drawings in the interest of production time and cost. Once put in service, the maintainers are under pressure to complete the ad-hoc maintenance action most expediently and at the least cost to minimize Aircraft on the Ground (AoG) time;  they simply cannot afford to be slowed down for the tedious task of reviewing the as-designed or as-built layout; and (b) Absence of Information Backward Flow (IBFA): Once the aircraft is returned to the flight line, they swiftly move to the next aircraft; the repair data from the inspection and maintenance just completed does not get transmitted upstream so neither the assembly line nor the design engineers can benefit from the in-service reality. Far worse, with no information backflow, today’s maintainer has no ability to review any of the past maintenance action. Moreover, without the field data communicated back upstream, the assembly line cannot modify its installation procedures, nor can the design engineers improve their “to build” design drawings.  Bottom Line: Reduced Readiness and increased Lifecycle Ownership Cost (LOC) – both against Navy’s mission. For wiring maintenance, the current method to ID a wire is archaic. Maintainers use bare eyes, often with a dental mirror + a flashlight, to ID the markings on the installed wiring in the aircraft. More often than not, the task forces the maintainer to work in ergonomically challenging postures, hence a heightened risk of physical injury. It takes more than 2 minutes per wire just to read the wire ID, and that too, with 8 to 12% error because the process is based on subjective human ability to read the wire ID with naked eyes or a magnifier. Then an additional 2-3 minutes to manually look up the database (often on paper) to identify the wire, its connectors and pin outs at the two ends. In total, this physically challenging manual task may take over 5 minutes per wire. With thousands of wires, harnesses, connectors etc., the cost incurred just for wire infrastructure maintenance is enormous. We now propose to integrate our NUVU and WIN (both TRL > 6) and AR/MR capabilities to create PLAID…an interactive AR toolset that would employ pattern layout capability to analyze the health of an aircraft’s wiring infrastructure in its field of view.  When fully implemented (end of Phase II), PLAID will become an affordable AR toolset using pattern recognition and providing intuitive visual overlays of complex wiring installations, routings, and clamp and abatement placements in relation to surrounding components and structure.