The pandemic dealt a devastating blow to many businesses, and that proved to be no exception for Spiral Science and Technology.
The startup was facing a dead end as government aviation and aerospace contracts dried up and disappeared practically overnight.
“We as a company effectively came to life through the Air Force Innovation Accelerator,” said Konstantyn Shyshkin, president and co-founder of Spiral Science and Technology. “It’s called AFWERX. We had gotten a beautiful contract with Tyndall Air Force Base in the Panhandle in Florida. At the time, we also had two pilot projects with Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa Airlines. We were using an augmented reality headset — Microsoft HoloLens — that would support aircraft repairs. It would give the mechanic a visual view of repair instructions and whatever contextual information was needed on the tarmac or in another MRO context. It was 2020, a COVID year, and it hit us very hard. All innovation programs folded in aerospace, so we started looking for a pivot, and we stumbled upon wind-energy manufacturing serendipitously.”
Enter Wind
That serendipity became a reality when Spiral Science was noticed by a major wind OEM, according to Shyshkin.
“We found a major OEM where a quality manager was looking to expand production without expanding the facility,” he said. “Inspection was one of the bottlenecks, and we had this technology. Our technology was a connection because aircraft is made of composites, and so are wind blades, although they’re less sophisticated. They don’t have engines, but, it turns out that the range of problems is similar along the inspection process. You need to document accurately the location of your findings.”
With Spiral’s technology, blade inspectors could use AR goggles to inspect the blade shell for defects much quicker and more accurately than traditional inspection methods, according to Shyshkin.
“Traditionally, they were doing it with just a tape measure and a piece of paper or iPad at best, but still it’s mechanical; you still need to measure, and sometimes you need to measure 10 times,” he said. “And we said, ‘No, you can just click once, and you have your measurements instantaneously.’”
The Creation of Roboscope
Unfortunately, the original goggles technology had to be phased out when Microsoft stopped making them, and so, Spiral Technology was forced to make another innovative pivot to continue its foothold in the wind sector, according to Shyshkin. This became the beginning of Spiral’s iPhone inspection app, Roboscope.
“The origin of this story began with mechanics who repair aircraft using a headset,” he said. “Now it has transformed into an iPhone app. What technicians need during the QC process, is they need a way of tracking themselves. If you think of Google Maps, you have GPS to tell you where you are on the street, but in the factory, you need to be more accurate. We are kind of the Google Maps of the factory process, and we’re doing this with Lidar. Modern iPhones have very powerful Lidars installed and, with the computer vision that we are developing now, we can get even more precise. This is a handy app that can replace the process of what technicians use to do manually.”
Shyshkin said that an important piece of Roboscope’s innovation is its ability to pinpoint defects accurately within a 350-foot blade, for example.
“We have a special kind of anchoring algorithm where, from the operator perspective, you find the defect, you pull out the app, and you make a couple of clicks, and it already knows where you are very precisely,” he said. “What we’re achieving so far is between one and two inches, and we are trying to bring it down to a one-inch accuracy.”
Shyshkin admits that the vision of the Roboscope and what the company has accomplished in its short lifetime wasn’t strategically planned.
“We did it because we can, and then we learned a lot and then we realized, as we were talking to mechanics in aerospace and then to manufacturing professionals, that this knowledge around quality control could involve the latest digital technologies, so why don’t we bundle it?” he said. “We became a company, effectively, for industrial quality control using two technologies. Augmented reality was the first historically, and now with AI and computer vision. AI is everywhere, but we are using it in a way that is the most real that you can think about. It is not taking anybody’s job. It is just doing a boring piece of the job that you don’t like.”
Available since February
Roboscope became available to OEMs in February, and it is being used by two OEMs as of this writing — a large one and a smaller one, according to Shyshkin.
“We eventually aim to bring it to every factory because it can be a productivity boost, at least in quality control,” he said. “And it’s very fun for operators. It’s like Pokemon GO a little bit. It’s a virtual thing. You are looking at something that does not exist, and it used to be some dirty, boring work. Now, it’s shiny and almost game-like. And on a management level, not only are we striking the right chords with AI innovation, but also the solution has a real business case.”
From a workflow aspect, Roboscope makes the current workflow move faster, which is the app’s most basic and important function, according to Shyshkin.
“We’re getting rid of paper, and people can just do the same to complete the same inspection,” he said. “Secondly — and this is very basic and not the main one, but easiest to understand — is the core. We are providing contextual information to the technician right on the shop floor. This results in higher accuracy and also speed if they are waiting for an engineering team to chip in and give them instructions. They can get all this on the spot.”
The app also serves to be a link to a digital database to the physical world of brick and mortar on the shop floor, according to Shyshkin. This function can be vital with the reality of manufacturing methods varying across the globe.
“If you have different factories like in Brazil or China or India, it turns out you can have different inspection results, because people are different, depending on which operator is on shift,” he said. “This tool allows you to standardize the results.”
Offline Operation
It also has the capability of working offline, according to Shyshkin.
“The data is completely air gapped inside the phone for the session to account for possible poor connections or concerns about confidentiality,” he said. “But then, to get this critical knowledge, you need to connect to the internal ERP system or a quality management system. Everyone has a different way. But you can tap into the knowledge base. You can have a call in real time with people right from the app. And, provided you have an internet connection, it works in real time. We were actually doing the test yesterday, and inspectors were in this factory, and I was monitoring remotely, and these markers just pop up on the screen on the virtual model of the blade, and I could immediately export the report and send it to the engineering team.”
As more OEMs discover Spiral Technology and its Roboscope app, Shyshkin expects his company’s innovative technology to make a mark in the wind sector.
“We want to build something that will last, and with all the recent discussions around AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), I still feel that we will have our spot, because you will always have a human operator in the loop to make complex decisions on engineering and manufacturing,” he said. “Even in the world of very advanced technologies, we see that we are building a unique niche that will empower operators. It’s like a nerve cell. We are giving them one very powerful nerve cell to the rest of the AIs and knowledge, but human operators still need to be there to make a decision and to make that call for the most complex tasks.”
Looking to the Future
Shyshkin admits that the road to where Spiral Science finds itself now has been a challenge, but he expects the experience it has gained along the way will help the company continue to prosper.
“It’s been a difficult journey, but I would say we were surviving in the right moments in time,” he said. “I’m grateful to my team and to my co-founder, Andrey, who basically was always seeing the future, and despite all the challenges, we stayed alive long enough to see the good things start happening to us. Now some people say it’s the best time to start a company. We are still a founder-led business, and we still do everything with passion, with our own attention — sometimes naivete — but it resonates with engineers because they also want to solve problems, and this is our DNA.”
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