Grand Forks Horizontal Structures

Structural damage and degradation jeopardizes the Air Force’s ability to generate air combat power. At Eglin AFB, a fire suppression system burst from a valve failure and buried the interior of King Hangar with 17 feet of foam, damaging five aircraft, killing a contractor, and rendering the building unusable for three months. At Tinker AFB, an electrical substation exploded causing $7 million in damage and an explosion large enough to be seen from space. The DAF faces a $30 billion maintenance and repair backlog. More than 1,500 facilities are rated poor, based on a Building Condition Index of 55 or less out of 100. House Appropriations military construction and veterans affairs subcommittee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-New York) said she had personally witnessed “atrocious conditions,” citing “airplane hangars being held together with duct tape and coat hangers; doors that are about to fall off.”   The Air Force uses manual, time-consuming and high-risk processes to perform damage assessment activities that are unable to keep up with the amount of work required. Typical structural inspections involve Airmen manually looking for damage for an annual inspection requirement or after an extreme weather event (i.e. a blizzard, hurricane, or tornado), or these activities occur reactively after a leak or anomaly is detected. Because these processes are human-driven, the DAF cannot keep up with the total number of structures requiring inspections and repairs and must prioritize some over others. The DAF has +120 installations with 165,000 structures around the globe. The current manual, time-consuming approach to damage assessments simply cannot keep up with the sheer volume of buildings. As a result, damage goes unidentified and potentially life-threatening structural damage goes unnoticed until it's too late. The Air Force has an opportunity to modernize its approach to facade inspection through robotics process automation so that its buildings are safe and operational. NY-based aRoboticsCompany introduces that solution. aRoboticsCompany proposes to partner with Grand Forks AFB’s 319th Civil Engineer Squadron (319 CES) on a SBIR Phase II RDT&E project to test and evaluate the feasibility of deploying their structural damage assessment robots on select horizontal buildings of Grand Forks AFB. Examples of horizontal test structures could include aircraft hangars, storage depots, maintenance bays, and headquarters dormitories. The project will assess the robots’ abilities to proactively identify structural damage and leaks, free up manpower, and accelerate the structural assessment process. The RDT&E engineering focus of this project will be to modify, adapt, and enhance the aRoboticsCompany robots to operate in the extreme weather and environmental conditions of Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota. This will include high wind and extreme cold ruggedization and the ability to operate with frost and precipitation build-up.