ASPIRE – Aerospace Special Processes Intelligence and Re-skilling of Employees

ASPIRE project innovation focuses on responding to the sustainable productivity need of aerospace special-process houses through the integration and piloting of our MVP vision intelligence application with our AeroDNA production-control solution. The combined solution will deliver the capability to extract real-time data on human performance to:

* digitise human action from skilled special-process operators to provide automated time, motion and error capture data
* alert operators about special-process defects and non-compliance vs. standardised process routes captured in AeroDNA so they can be remedied immediately
* extract and segment video of human actions on the special-process house shop-floor to retain best-practice through digitalised knowledge transfer.
* remote access to visualise special-process operations in real-time by distributed process engineering teams
* capture unprecedented business intelligence about special-process human operations which will feed into the AeroDNA scheduling solution to optimise electroplating vats and heat treatment oven utilisation which significantly impacts energy consumption and sustainability.

The approach leverages state-of-the-art AI computer vision to recognise operator actions on special processes to ensure that stringent aerospace quality standards are met. The use of convolutional neural networks offers more generalisability for pattern recognition and performs better for detecting anomalies compared to traditional automated optical inspection. A digital record of the actions that have been performed on a product can then be stored as a proof of quality management as well as be used to train new special-process operators. This record is useful for digitally connecting factories so that defects can be traced through supply-chains and used to prove quality standards.