The Air Force commissioned the Tidop research group to develop the system.
Obtains the aircraft parts in 3D and monitors all its elements.
What until not too many years ago was considered fiction in the cinema, is now starting to become a reality thanks to the great research work of expert engineers in different fields. Thanks to them, the impossible is starting to become possible. How else could we imagine that a mechanic who performs maintenance work in the Air Force could have a substitute as qualified as him, but without as much experience, thanks to an augmented reality system made up of Google Glass type glasses, connected to a tablet the size of a smartphone located on the wrist. It is a virtual system that will allow the mechanic to be assisted at any time through the application of augmented reality technologies, which will serve to improve and save costs in the maintenance of the air fleet. In this case, the brake pack and the landing gear of the F18. The project is called Cybernetic System for Assistance in the Maintenance of Military Aircraft (Siceman) and has been jointly worked on since 2013 by the Turbo Propeller Industry (ITP) and the Information Technologies for 3D Digitalisation of Complex Objects (Tidop) research group of the University of Salamanca (Usal). Led by Professor Diego González Aguilera, from the Department of Cartographic and Terrain Engineering, this group has the advice of the Air Force Logistics Support Command, whose leaders were the ones who spoke of the “clear need” in the aerospace sector to implement a virtual system of assistance to mechanics. All this, taking into account that the Air Force is also suffering cuts in its staff and that there is a need to save budget, since “the cost in the aerospace sector is very high,” as González Aguilera explains. All these factors are what push to present a project that is the winner in the national call supported by European funds. The overall budget amounts to 2.5 million euros, co-financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Union, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Of this amount, the research takes half a million, which implies the hiring of four people, within a team of ten members. Given the complexity of the maintenance of the F18, the Air Force shows the need to have a virtual system that can assist the mechanic, based on virtual and augmented reality technologies, as is being done in the United States, although trying to improve it. “The Army invites us to do it,” says the head of Tidop, who graphically explains the objective of the project: “That a mechanic equipped with Google glass type glasses and a CPU that can be carried in a backpack or a belt, even a smartphone or a tablet, is able to know what he has to do, even if he is not an expert in aircraft maintenance.” The aim is, in short, to “be able to train with this system”, undertaking different tasks such as changing a brake pack, assisting with the maintenance of the landing gear door or any other laborious task that would require a manual “in many cases difficult to decipher”. The project has two main milestones. The first of these consists of obtaining 3D images of the parts and objects of the F18 that are going to be used in maintenance tasks. In total, between the brake pack and the landing gear, there may be around 200 objects modeled at the air base itself by the mechanics who disassemble and assemble them. In this way, data can be taken with photos, different sensors and lasers, to “capture that reality and obtain those objects in 3D”, which will be the ones that “feed the recognition and augmented reality system”. This is where the second milestone of the project occurs, since this system is the one that “is supported” by the glasses that the maintenance mechanic puts on when he is supervising the plane. Once the system has been told the specific task it has to undertake, the glasses will be the ones that recognize the brake pack or the landing gear with the help of the tablet, since they have previously been modeled. Using this smartphone located on the forearm, the operator will be able to follow the steps to take to solve any problem using the glasses. And all of this in a simple way, since it is a system that does not require visual or spatial interpretation of where and how that part is. The augmented reality glasses will guide the mechanic to it. According to Diego González Aguilera, all of this “results in absolute efficiency in maintenance and training tasks.” In addition, the system will be equipped with voice commands, since the operator, when he is doing his job, usually has his hands busy or dirty. The Siceman project, which started in 2013 and will end in 2016, will culminate in the creation of a prototype for the Air Force, with the intention of “extrapolating it to the fleets of Colombia and Brazil,” since within the same military air consortium, these systems “can be very well received.” Furthermore, it is not ruled out that this innovative system could be oriented to the market, not only for maintenance and repair of military aircraft, but also for civil aircraft and with possible applications in the automotive sector.
