SBIR-STTR Award

Through the use of voice recognition technology, logistics FM radio nets could be electronically monitored. The system would recognize pertinent logistics information, capture it, and feed it to the appropriate legacy systems. Maintenance personnel rely on the FM radio to stay aware of current status. All key supervisors have radios and relay key maintenance status and location information to each other and the Maintenance Operations Centers. Normally, each squadron will have its own net, as well as specialist, Aerospace Ground Equipment and munitions. When an aircraft aborts or some other critical maintenance action occurs, all pertinent data is relayed across this net. KLSS recommends a project to evaluate the possibility of capturing aircraft maintenance status and failure edata by using voice recognition technology to monitor the FM Net(s). Voice recognition products are now available that are accurate and support continuous speech recognition.

In the current aircraft maintenance environment, maintenance technicians spend excessive time away from their primary duties manually updating status boards and legacy systems. Much of this work is duplicative and results in inaccurate and untimely information flow. The primary objective of this SBIR is to eliminate this wasted time by passively collecting maintenance failure and status data from the FM radio net using the latest voice recognition technology. A secondary objective of this SBIR is to leverage the work done supporting the primary objective, such as the building of a maintenance vocabulary and other logistics support characteristics, to design and build a tool that will support data entry using the same voice recognition technologies.

Benefits:
Time now spent manually updating systems could be put to other uses. Wing leadership would have more accurate, reliable and real-time information available to support Agile Logistics Support and Two Level Maintenance concepts. Using voice inquires could eliminate the need for managers to sort through many systems and screens to find required information or make follow-up calls. Eliminate the risk associated with not having complete data or inaccurate data in the AFMC database systems.