OPTO-KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N231-025

Description

Airports are critical infrastructure that require constant maintenance to ensure safe and efficient operations.  One of the major challenges that airport authorities face is the removal of foreign object debris (FOD) from runways and taxiways.  FOD can cause significant damage to aircraft and pose a safety risk to passengers and crew.  Therefore, it is crucial to have a reliable and efficient method for FOD removal.  To address this challenge, the use of robots for FOD removal has become increasingly popular in recent years.  However, to operate these robots effectively, they must be able to receive and send voice commands over air traffic control (ATC) radio frequencies.  Historically, high accuracy voice transcription models under noisy transmission conditions have not been possible without large language models running within a cloud environment.  However, in the past few months, the latest edge AI hardware along with state-of-the-art speech recognition models have made noisy radio speech transcription possible on edge AI processors.  To address this technology gap, OKSI proposes the Autonomous Vehicle Intelligent Communication System (AVICS) for Air Traffic Control (ATC) to solve the automated FOD removal problem.