Integrated Digital Environment for Airman Accommodation and Fit

The United States Air Force has broadened Career Enlisted Aviator height. This opens the aperture for more people to have the opportunity to fly. The expanded and diversified aircrew population, however, poses great challenges to the fit of uniforms and flight gears and the accommodation of cockpit and other aircraft workstations. Therefore, we propose to build a software platform that utilizes digital twins of airmen and physical assets, 3D synthetic space, and extended reality to create an Integrated Digital Environment for Airman Accommodation and Fit (IDEA).  The proposed technology—IDEA will help Air Force agencies to optimize aircrew mission assignment and to improve their performance and protection.  It will also help Air Force vendors and suppliers to improve their product design.  By utilizing digital twins of airmen and physical assets, IDEA allows one to perform fit/accommodation in an immersive 3D space interactively for each individual airman, thus providing bio-fidelic, dynamic, holistic, and personalized results. It will advance the digital transformation of airman fit and accommodation. Phase I objectives include (a) discover customers and end-users from Air Force; (b) identify their needs and requirements; (c) modify/refine our concept of solution to meet their needs; and (d) define requirements and milestones for Phase II. The full development of IDEA will be performed in Phase II.