At a recent demonstration and transition workshop at the Wright Brothers Institute in Dayton, Ohio, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Manufacturing Science and Technology Program (MSTP)-funded Quality Control, Quality Assurance Companion (QQComp) team successfully identified transition sponsors and established action plans with two Military Service maintenance, manufacturing, and engineering organizations: The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, Lakehurst, and the Air Force’s Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex (WR-ALC). These are significant milestones for the team as it works toward a solution to a difficult Department of Defense challenge.
The process of inspecting complex Department of Defense systems is expensive and time-consuming. Extended reality (XR), which combines the use of augmented, mixed, and virtual realities to create an immersive experience through computer vision, can help address this by giving operators a means to inspect systems accurately and efficiently. However, currently available XR platforms suffer from a lack of interoperability between product lifecycle management systems and visualization modalities. Current technical data package practices do not lend themselves to low-level mappings between authoritative design data and inspection reports. Nor do commercial-off-the-shelf toolkits adequately address automated instruction delivery. Additionally, the XR applications being procured by DoD depots and the industrial base lack scalability and agility. QQComp addresses these shortcomings by advancing not only the physical XR tools, but also the digital infrastructure and data quality standards.
MSTP’s QQComp augments human workers’ inspection activities with an advanced, DoD-specific computer vision toolkit for object detection to support maintenance activities, while also developing a standards-based infrastructure for industrial XR. By maturing open-source standard data translation tools across the Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP), the Quality Information Framework (QIF), and the Graphics Library Transmission Format (glTF), the QQComp team demonstrates a viable path toward a file format-agnostic approach to model-based quality assurance. A standards-based approach will result in government-developed open-source software that can be reused and shared by the larger community, resulting in efficiency gains within the industrial base, error reduction and detection, and cost savings by avoiding vendor lock-in.