CTMA Technology Competition – 2016 Recap
A new technology challenge competition was held in conjunction with the 2016 CTMA Partners Meeting. A $125,000 project award was offered for the winning submission. Funding was provided by the OSD with in-kind program management provided by NCMS. Over 60 proposals were submitted by industry and DoD participants. The proposals covered a wide range of new technologies ranging from new corrosion coatings to predictive analytics for maintenance management. They were judged by the Joint Technical Exchange Group (JTEG) principals representing the services and OSD. Six finalists were chosen. The finalists briefed their technology proposals at the CTMA Partners Meeting.
2016 Competition Finalists
- Honeywell, Inc. – Voice Directed Inspection Maintenance System
- Naval Service Warfare Center Philadelphia – Enhanced Maintenance Augmented with Reality Technologies
- Ridgetop Group, Inc. – ETRS Soft Fault Detection Tool
- Automated Precision, Inc. –Highly Accurate, Agile 3D Scanner for Maintenance and Repair
- U.S. Army Research Laboratory – Power Circuit Board Manufacture by Cold Spray
- Xoran Technologies, LLC – 3D Non-Destructive Testing for Composite Parts
The winning proposal came from Honeywell, Inc. “Voice Directed Inspection Maintenance System” or VIMS. A new VIMS project was initiated under the joint NCMS/DoD CTMA Program.
The objective of VIMS is to demonstrate that floor technicians are able to optimize time and skills to inspect, record, and repair military assets through new voice activated technology ultimately supporting the Air Force CBM+ program strategy.
Inspection and maintenance efforts of commercial industry, particularly inspection and maintenance checklists, continues to be highly inefficient and error prone. For most commercial applications of large fleets, the Inspection, Maintenance, and Sustainment (IMS) process still
requires the technician to enter their observations and findings as a separate process from the actual inspection and maintenance procedure. Data capture from inspections when manually entered into a sustainment database is prone to high error rates as a result of manual entry.
The solution consists of a wearable mobile device and a wireless headset with microphone.
The system becomes trained to respond to and accept the maintainer’s voice, eventually being able to distinguish between dialects and accents after an initial voice training period. Today’s technical orders are converted to voice-based, step-bystep instructions. Technicians listen
to checklist instructions and capture their observations by simply speaking their responses. This eliminates outdated back-and-forth manual data entry and look-up time on a laptop, hand-held device, or paper forms. The solution also ensures that the technicians strictly adhere to the standard operating procedure for a given type of asset while also allowing them opportunities to capture out of the ordinary findings. The data captured can be automatically transferred to any commercial or DoD back-end system for record keeping.
VIMS provides a hands-free solution to get work instructions and document in real time.
The solution to be added to the maintainer toolkit is Honeywell’s VOCOLLECT voice-directed solution, which enables technicians to elevate their documentation and compliance to levels never before attainable.
The initial VIMS demonstration project is in its initiation stages at the Warner Robins AFB. Select C-5 and F-15 sub-systems will be inspected using VIMS compared to current inspection processes. Inspection cards will be provided for integration into VIMS. Warner Robins will capture and document current productivity and accuracy metrics to establish a benchmark for quantifying project success.
What does that mean?
- Increases quality and consistency of service
- Reduces maintenance costs/increases capacity
- Enables constant process improvement
“Over $3.5 million in new CTMA projects were generated due to exposure of the technologies presented during the Technology Challenge at last year’s CTMA Partners Meeting. A ‘win-win’ for all.” —Debbie Lilu, Director, CTMA Operations.