Key Industries

Precision Maintenance with AI and SWIR for Aerospace


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Overview


Acquisition programs are becoming increasingly sensitive to cost, schedule and performance risks. Maintenance efforts involved in corrosion inspection are significant across all branches of the armed forces, costing billions of dollars each year in manpower, equipment, and materials. By incorporating a system capable of identifying exposure to corrosive environments and corrosion of aircraft alloys, significant cost savings can be realized, not only in terms of minimized man-hours expended for inspection, but also in reducing aircraft downtime for scheduled maintenance.

Visual nondestructive inspections (NDI) for defects are critical for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) operations and are often the most economical method of detecting surface defects before they reach dangerous sizes. These inspections are conducted in a multitude of industries, including aerospace, infrastructure, and maritime. While technologies such as robotic borescopes and aerial drones have increased number and quality of available inspection data, humans remain the primary decision makers on the acceptability of a part or surface. This manual process is often costly, time-consuming, and subject to human errors that arise from mental fatigue or boredom. Computer vision (CV) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have been shown to excel at image analysis tasks and have the potential to provide accurate and reliable defect recognition for automated visual inspection systems that can significantly reduce maintenance costs and improve inspection efficiency. Analatom's Automated Inspection using AI (AIDL) technology was developed as an automated, human-in-the-loop (HITL) solution for visual inspections, combining the power of Machine Learning algorithms with human expertise. The result is fast, highly-accurate inspections that are ideal for critical assets.

In addition to traditonal imaging, Analatom's AIDL takes NDI to the next level by leveraging hyperspectral imaging to enable to detection of subsurface defects. Hyperspectral imaging is particularly effective for composite materials, including glass-fiber reinforced polymers (GFRP) and carbon-fiber composites (CFRP). This powerful combination allows for the detection of:​

Subsurface defects such as cracks, voids, and internal damage.​
Water ingression, which can compromise the integrity of the material.​
Delamination, a common failure mode in composite structures.

Benefits of AIDL


Analatom's AIDL technology offers significant advantages for nondestructive inspections, enhancing accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility in maintenance processes:

Speed and Efficiency: Inspections are conducted quickly, reducing downtime for critical assets and increasing throughput to meet production goals. AIDL reduces the number of images requiring human review, allowing for faster, automated defect identification.
Ease of Use: Systems are intuitive and require limited training, enabling rapid adoption by maintenance teams and improving the overall effectiveness of users within the system.
Precision and Quality: Hyperspectral imaging captures detailed spectral data that, when paired with AIDL’s advanced AI algorithms, can detect surface and subsurface anomalies—such as cracks, voids, water ingression, and delamination—that standard visual methods often miss.
Improved Flexibility and Adaptability: AIDL’s AI algorithms can be rapidly retrained and tuned for new inspection tasks, offering unmatched flexibility for novel applications and ensuring adaptability to diverse maintenance systems.
Reduced Maintenance Costs: By automating defect recognition and improving inspection consistency, AIDL minimizes costly errors, reduces labor-intensive processes, and optimizes resource allocation.
Continuous Improvement: Errors are tracked to correct misclassifications, and models are continuously updated, ensuring the system remains accurate, reliable, and up-to-date with evolving inspection requirements.

By combining cutting-edge hyperspectral imaging with AI-driven automation, Analatom provides a streamlined, cost-effective solution for high-precision inspections, empowering industries to enhance asset reliability, reduce operational costs, and optimize maintenance strategies.

Success Stories

AIDL was first expanded to utilize shortwave-infrared (SWIR) imaging under an SBIR Phase II contract for identification of defects on F-15 rudders. This system highlighted and automatically identified defects that were not visible to the human eye, capturing anomalies that would otherwise be left unseen by traditional inspection methods. The AI solution was deployed at Robins AFB as a web application within the Amazon Web Services ecosystem, creating a lightweight scalable system that delivers consistent and accurate defect detection capabilities across multiple platforms The AIDL system provided substantial resource and time savings by improving inspection efficiency through the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to reduce the number of images that require manual review and increase the accuracy of inspections.

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