
The overall goal of the program is to help the Navy cut down on the labor and material costs of inspections and to make ship repairs more efficient. Navy to quickly and seamlessly examine tens of thousands of images to prioritize the needs to be repaired immediately and or later on,” Mike Daniels, vice president of global public sector for Google Cloud, tells Breaking Defense.

“The AI technology behind this enabled the U.S. To do so, the technology partners will likely need to incorporate “additional Navy assets, data sets, sensors and integration with Navy systems,” a Google Cloud spokesperson tells Nextgov. Over time, as the machine learning models are refined, the Navy may be in a position to predict when and where rusting might occur. The technology can also cut down the amount of time a ship needs to remain in a shipyard for repairs. Navy Looks to Save Money via More Automated Ship Maintenanceĭrones will inspect ships, and then the AI tools will use the images they capture to identify maintenance needs, especially areas of rust and corrosion, to help engineers prioritize which repairs need to happen first. The project will also use drones and automated image analysis technology.

The service branch is partnering with Google Cloud on the project, and Google “will provide the underlying cloud platform and data storage for the thousands of images of ships used to develop a machine learning model,” FedScoop reports.

The Navy is using drones and artificial intelligence to survey and analyze ships to detect, and someday predict, problems like rusting. The report adds that in those years, 75 percent of planned maintenance periods for aircraft carriers and submarines were finished late. What’s clear is that there is room for an improvement - and a plan to boost ship maintenance through technology.įor fiscal years 2015 through 2019, the Navy spent $2.8 billion in capital investments to address shipyard performance, among other things, according to an August Government Accountability Office report. For the Navy, ship maintenance and improving shipyard performance is critical to maintaining the vessels that protect the United States.
