One of the biggest challenges for the DoD is to keep operating and support costs for weapon systems low. Maintenance and sustainment is 39% of these costs
1. At the same time, weapon systems maintenance is critical to defense readiness.
2. The 2014 drawdown which saw a reduction in close to 20,000 airmen throughout the Air Force, combined with the retiring workforce have led to a shortage of maintainers and a skill and knowledge gap. The lack of an efficient method to store and transfer knowledge from expert maintainers and effectively train less experienced maintainers has resulted in increased personnel training costs as well as unplanned downtime. Innovative solutions are needed to accelerate the development of junior maintainers to experts by leveraging the expertise of senior personnel.
In our work with defense customers funded by SBIR contracts, we find that AR/VR experiences that merely put “sticky notes” or “check lists” on equipment are not as effective as experiences that can track individual steps of the worker activity and provide corresponding feedback. We enable the system to figure out and alert a technician when she makes a mistake. This allows such systems to expand beyond training use cases and assist workers become more efficient in day-to-day work.
We enable training a worker in half the time for half the cost, and one-third the instructor time. Our platform improves first time yields (FTY) by 10%, and reduces manual assembly related quality issues by 60%, resulting in significantly reduction of maintenance and sustainment costs.
Managing U.S. Air Force Aircraft Operating and Support Costs: Insights from Recent RAND Analysis and Opportunities for the Future. Boito et al. 2016. RAND Corporation. Click here
The drawdown blew a hole in the Air Force’s maintenance ranks. How it’s digging its way out. Stephen Losey. March 5, 2017. Air Force Times. Click here
Huy takes our product roadmap and figures out what’s achievable with today’s AI advances, and what we need to invent to solve our customers’ pain points.
Huy led teams of scientists and engineers at NEC and invented technologies for driver assistance systems that are part of 500,000+ Honda cars. He is an inventor on more than 20 US patents, and his research papers are cited by every lab from MIT, Stanford, and CMU to Apple, Google, and Baidu.
Michael works closely with our marquis customers to understand their needs, and figures out the best solution that immediately adds dollars to their bottom line.
Michael has almost 20 years of enterprise sales experience. He has held sales leadership roles at pioneering AI and computer vision startups.
Andrey takes inventions and converts them into innovations. He leads our product engineering team to turn our scientific prototypes into robust customer-facing products.
Andrey co-founded and successfully exited a startup to immigrate to the US. He spent his next eight years building the core data science infrastructure for Amazon’s supply chain planning team, and the CV/ML infrastructure for Microsoft’s HoloLens organization.
Zeeshan focuses on delighting our customers by understanding their needs and defining product and strategy to meet and exceed these needs. He works closely with our sales leadership to grow our customer base.
Zeeshan was a scientific leader at Microsoft’s HoloLens division, where he invented AI technologies to assist frontline workers across industries. Earlier, he shipped IoT platforms and visual defect detection software for manufacturers at Siemens and MVTec GmbH.
