QuickTurn: Transforming DoD Maintenance with Comprehensive Spatial Digital Twins

CBM+

Problem Statement: The DoD faces critical sustainment challenges from unstructured, siloed maintenance data. Manual data translation creates inconsistencies, subjective decision-making, and slow feedback loops that compromise fleet readiness. For naval aviation, this results in millions of wasted man-hours annually, especially when tracking pervasive issues like corrosion quantification, which is currently poorly managed and hard to address proactively.

Innovation Solution: QuickTurn™ is a proprietary spatial computing platform that creates comprehensive digital twins of military assets, transforming maintenance and logistics. Built on proprietary Converged Mixed Reality and Parallel Content Authoring (PCA) frameworks, QuickTurn unifies data in a spatial context, closing the gap between the physical asset and its digital record. The integrated Mark2Maintain (M2M) module allows maintainers to visually annotate discrepancies, like corrosion, directly onto the 3D model, generating structured, quantifiable data in real-time. QuickTurn automatically converts legacy technical manuals into interactive, multimodal 3D guidance, enabling accurate, traceable, and adaptive “5th Generation Maintainer” capabilities. Furthermore, the system incorporates a natural language processing chatbot to allow users to query spatial data using voice or text, enabling advanced analytics quickly and efficiently.

Benefits to the DoD: QuickTurn delivers immediate, quantifiable improvements in maintenance affordability and agility. Automating the generation of Maintenance Action Forms (MAFs) and work instructions from spatial data is projected to save over 55,000 processing hours per year at one depot site, equating to an estimated annual cost avoidance of up to $9.6 million. The platform supports data-driven predictive maintenance, enhances fleet readiness through consistent, high-quality maintenance, and is designed for seamless interoperability with next-generation systems like the Navy’s Material Condition Automated Documentation System. Its architecture ensures cross-service applicability for aircraft, ground vehicles, and naval vessels.

Innovation Challenges: The primary challenge is converting vast libraries of unstructured, legacy technical documentation into a cohesive, structured format that supports real-time 3D interaction and version control. We are also focused on securing Authority to Operate for the platform and ensuring seamless bi-directional connectivity with existing maintenance databases for critical DoD deployment.

Technical Maturity/Demonstration Results: QuickTurn is currently assessed at TRL 5 following a successful SBIR effort with NAVAIR. The functional prototype demonstrated full end-to-end maintenance workflows, including O-Level and D-Level inspections on the E-2D aircraft, real-time metadata “painting” of discrepancies using M2M, and procedural generation of draft MAFs directly from spatial data. The core PCA component is highly mature (TRL 7).