Simplified Intelligent Augmented Reality Quality Assurance Inspection (SIA QA), Topic: N201-008 Phase II Full Proposal

In Phase II, Team AVATAR will provide a tangible, resilient, and validated prototype solution to the original topic resulting in a working solution that leverages AI and AR to resolve critical issues in wiring harness inspection & maintenance. SIA QA will empower maintainers & inspectors to wear an AR headset, approach a specific V-22 wiring harness, and get both contextually relevant information about the status & state of the wires, as well as on-the-job support. SIA QA integrates two components: (1) an offline process & technology that captures “Should-be” data and makes it exploitable by (2) an online process & technology that quickly compares, in real-time, “Should-be” data to “As-is” data, and acts upon the comparison, identifying improper wiring harness routing & wire type identification for exposed bundles, correcting the wiring harness, and to refine underlying databases & offline process. The instantiation of SIA QA will focus on augmenting Phase I concepts for offline and online processes. Instantiation of Offline processes will include capturing aircraft data (should travel restrictions permit local visits) by photographing, videographing, and LIDAR capture of correctly-wired harnesses for critical V-22 systems. The maturation of SIA QA will target both the Offline & Online processes. We will expand the depth, breadth, & type of coverage of the “Should-Be” database: respectively, this expansion will target higher granularity of system levels being included in the database (depth), higher variability in conditions under which data is captured such as lighting, angles, etc. (breadth), and additional methods of collections such as video and LIDAR (coverage). The leveraging of wiring schematics will be an exploratory goal in Phase II. We believe that schematics provide significant additional data for SIA QA to run its AI engine and support maintainers & inspectors. The hardware upgrades will be a “trade study”-like objective for Phase II. With the increasing availability and deployment of new hardware supporting computer vision and AR, Team AVATAR needs to ensure that SIA QA works on the equipment and hardware most likely to be employed by maintenance crews. The affordance of process improvement reasoning is another technical objective in Phase II. Recognizing the nature of the ongoing support SIA QA will provide to inspectors & technicians alike, there are insights to be inferred from the repeated and widespread usage of SIA QA. The evaluation of SIA QA will also cover both types of processes. On the Offline side, we will measure the data coverage of our “Should-Be” database against the larger needs for a full platform (quantitative assessment) as well as the soundness of the data itself using standard practices (qualitative assessment). We will review the architecting of SIA QA to ensure its resilience against future needs (RMF and on-ramping to government systems). On the Online side, we will perform a principled dual assessment of SIA QA.