Global aviation is increasing, but the current lack of qualified maintenance personnel is becoming very problematic.It may eventually lead to a reduced availability of the fleets and, thus, reduced revenues for their operators. Part of the solution is to increase the efficiency of the existing maintenance processes by introducing innovative tooling.
Royal NLR has developed a remote support tool together with KLM within the R&D program BrightSky.
The challenge
Currently, many airline operators have difficulties to find qualified and experienced maintenance personnel. This problem is expected to worsen in the near future. This will lead to increased downtimes and reduced revenues. Increasing the productivity of the maintenance personnel is needed to tackle this problem.
The solution
NLR demonstrated that the maintenance process can be successfully monitored and guided by qualified personnel by using multiple vision angles (first-person and overview camera). Furthermore, the tool offers different means to exchange information (voice communication, chat functionality, maintenance manual, etc.), while the 3D situational representation can be assessed by the remote support personnel by inspecting and manipulating NeRF 3D models. This demonstration showed an effective and innovative tool allowing the maintainers to perform its tasks more efficiently.
What did we do?
Within the national research program BrightSky, NLR developed together with KLM a digital platform which enables the remote support of maintainers. The platform can be used to connect a concentrated pool of highly qualified experts at the home base to general maintenance personnel at other locations.
This facilitates easier planning and less travel. To provide the home based experts a live overview of the situation, various viewing tools are integrated into the platform, including NeRF (Neural Radiance Field) technology; this offers improved interaction between the on-site personnel and the remote expert.
Project partners:
Industry :
Research organisations:
This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) research and innovation programme under
grant agreement no xxxx
