VirtualWorx™: Transforming Maintenance Concepts through Augmented Reality Collaboration Capabilities

SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONSVirtualWorx™ began as a 2015 Raytheon Six Sigma process improvement project to solve challenges faced by customers who were being asked to "do more with less" such that Operations & Sustainment (O&S) costs became a significant aspect in the planning and awarding of new systems, as well as for upgrades to existing systems. This raised the need to investigate opportunities that reduced O&S costs, which spanned the spectrum from technology-enabled maintenance operations to autonomy and analytics. VirtualWorx™ focused on the former and in particular, the process of flying technicians to international field sites to solve challenging troubleshooting and repair issues that were beyond the capabilities of the local maintainers but would have broader implications affecting product maintainability.The opportunity focused on business process improvement through the insertion of technology to better leverage global human resources and extend the significant breadth and depth of engineering expertise from Raytheon Centers of Excellence. This would allow support of deployed systems anywhere in the world through secure two-way audio & video communication up to and including augmented reality-based interactive remote collaboration. Figure 1 depicts the brainstorming session that resulted in a "back-of-the-napkin" design.The vision was to provide a secure enterprise, technical collaboration solution by implementing augmented reality-based communication capability to improve operational availability (Ao) of a system to perform its mission, reduce overall sustainment costs (including significant reduction in program travel), and provide effective troubleshooting of systems under repair.The proposed strategy prioritized customer driven use cases and network architecture development to:•Establish scalable Outside Contiguous United State (OCONUS) reach-back connectivity for technical support between a remote user and subject matter expert over a secure infrastructure worldwide•Facilitate technical support via a common environment using Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities over existing company network infrastructure•Enable the spectrum of collaboration across the enterprise to reduce staffing costs, leverage technical expertise, and provide improved Efficiency, Effectiveness, Capacity, and Capability (E2C2).With a strong business case, a successful proof-of-concept phase gained support from senior leadership in engineering and digital technology and earned further investment through Raytheon Independent Research and Development (IRAD) funding to move the project forward into a pilot phase for the first use case - remotely supported maintenance.To date, VirtualWorx™ has been successfully piloted and deployed on various internal and customer programs handling a variety of data and communication-rich exchanges that span the entire development life cycle.Underneath the system’s hardware and Raytheon Technologies’ global network infrastructure, VirtualWorx™ is powered by Librestream’s Onsite software platform that provides responsive technical support throughout the product life cycle allowing the emerging workforce to respond in a way employees feel most comfortable—via video.VirtualWorx™ has become a Raytheon Technologies Enterprise solution for end-to-end augmented reality collaboration specifically tailored to support remote maintenance of aerospace and defense repairable assets. The on-premises solution carries export controlled technical data and delivers live reach-back support over an increasing variety of use cases since the initial proof-of-concept—to support maintenance and repair of deployed systems around the world. It streams AR-enhanced live audio & video between field service engineers, subject matter experts, domestic and international business partners and is accessible anywhere on the company’s global network and through virtual private networking (VPN) access from off-site locations.Return on investment (ROI) has been realized from the initial remote maintenance use case to broader applications of the technology to resolve both internal and external challenges. Many of these recent challenges were especially brought on by recent COVID pandemic conditions that restricted global travel, limited face-to-face communication, and prevented movement of personnel as sites were locked-down due to COVID exposure concerns.