A robotics company and a defense contractor have teamed up for a high-tech fix to the military’s aircraft maintenance problem. Gecko Robotics and L3Harris announced Wednesday they will use drones to take thousands of images of aircraft and build digital twins, leading to much faster turnaround times for maintenance.
The time it takes to fix or do preventative maintenance on U.S. military aircraft has been growing longer and longer as the aircraft age, resulting in ever-lower readiness rates. Under the new partnership, drones will take 10,000 high-definition photos of aircraft in order to build full-scale digital models of planes. Then, using machine-vision object-detection software, inspectors can identify critical maintenance issues like joints, dents, far faster than they could without the tech, because as the drone can move around the plane far faster than a human engineer on a ladder or scaffold. An official with Gecko Robotics told Defense One maintainers could even do inspections remotely, and be able to detect issues that would be otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
Officials describe the system as a 360-degree “extended reality” environment, similar to virtual reality but, rather than an immersive virtual world, it’s an enhanced view of the real world.
“A year of prototype testing with Gecko in collaboration with multiple military customers has identified numerous applications for this technology, including virtual visual inspections, configuration review and robust defect identification,” Sean Ling, General Manager of modernization and modifications at L3Harris said in a statement.
A Gecko Robotics official told Defense One that L3Harris is already rolling out the system on L3Harris planes.
Gecko Robotics is also working with the Navy to use the company’s wall-climbing robots to conduct careful, point-by-point inspections of ship hulls. The company says that can reduce the maintenance times for certain vessels down from 11 days to just one.
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