The realm of Extended Reality (XR), which includes Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR), is a promising technological capability believed to be well-suited to the Air Force mission in aerospace manufacturing and sustainment.
The Manufacturing and Industrial Technology Division (ManTech) of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is eager to identify basic and applied research and development opportunities that will benefit the Air Force manufacturing and maintenance enterprise. They’re working within a short timeframe to identify research opportunities for the Spring 2021 buy-plan.
ManTech partnered with Wright Brothers Institute (WBI), which customized a team of experts, including 10EQS, Frost and Sullivan and IDea, to conduct a deep dive of Extended Reality technologies and the competitive landscape, including current capabilities, trends, next generation capabilities, and potential use cases. Together, they identified potential technology/capability gaps in XR technologies and processes that specifically apply to defense manufacturing and product life cycle management. This information was critical to identifying key participants for a two-day Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM), run by AFRL, that focused on XR technology.
The Air Force ManTech TIM was successfully held 16-17 Feb 2021. Participants included a large variety of different stakeholders, including Aerospace OEMs, industrial users/integrators, XR Hardware and software developers, academia, and the military community. The TIM included large plenary sessions as well as breakout workshops built around Manufacturing and Sustainment subgroups.
XLeap Facilitation Tool was used along with Government Zoom’s ability to breakout the TIM participants into two main breakouts (Manufacturing and Sustainment) with their own voice and video channels. The two ‘teams’ were then brought back together to share and compare information. By combining the skilled facilitation of WBI with these state-of-the-art virtual tools identified and implemented by WBI, this virtual TIM was able to equal, if not exceed, results previously experienced in face-to-face TIMs. (It’s worth noting that a winter storm blanketed much of the country the same days.) WBI and its team provided the expertise and tools that allowed AFRL to rapidly gain a much clearer understanding of Market Landscape, key players and contacts as well a near and future trends.
A primary goal of this project was to more clearly define needs and opportunities where XR technology could impact the defense aerospace manufacturing and sustainment enterprise within several years, without regard to current technical limitations. By identifying use cases (demonstration opportunities) that leverage existing technology or technology that could be soon available, as well as defining projects that meet the AirForce’s ManTech criteria, AFRL will be able to lay out a roadmap of prioritized tech maturation projects to fund in the up-coming AFRL/RXM buy-plan.