Design Interactive, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF182-005

Description

Aircraft maintenance is critical to Air Force readiness. However, the 2014 drawdown and the retiring workforce have led to a shortage of maintainers and a skill and knowledge gap. To maintain high levels of readiness, innovative solutions are needed to accelerate the development of a junior maintainers to expertise while also leveraging the expertise and know-how of senior personnel. Design Interactive, Inc. (DI) created AUGMENTORTM, an AR application for maintenance troubleshooting and repair guidance, which was specifically designed to empower experts to capture, author, and distribute their expertise to help enterprises close the skill and knowledge gap. AUGMENTOR™ provides an intuitive authoring platform to create diagnostic methods and repair guides, saving these to a database that can be accessed by any other maintainer across the enterprise using Microsoft’s HoloLens. The proposed Phase I effort supports a feasibility analysis to investigate the technological, personnel, process and cost considerations for Air Force adoption of AUGMENTOR™ to support maintenance teams. Interviews with expert and less experienced maintainers would also gather feedback such as the most appropriate use cases for the system, any missing features that would be useful, and other maintenance domains within the Air Force and DoD that might find it useful.