NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Naval ship engine manufacturer, equipment and services provider Fairbanks Morse Defense (FMD) has begun a program to mentor, partner with and aid startup companies and small businesses that have technologies that it can leverage to better meet the needs of its customers.
The FMD Accelerator program already has a small number of participants, including several the company showcased at a maritime conference here that improve the ability to maintain shipboard systems and equipment more efficiently and at reduced cost and time.
“Our accelerator program is something we’ve been working on for the last year or so and what we’re trying to figure out is how do we bring the most innovative solutions to our customers,” FMD CEO George Whittier told reporters on Tuesday during the annual Navy League Sea-Air-Space Exposition. The company is spending single-digits millions of dollars on the program, he said.
Companies can apply to joint FMD Accelerator and FMD is accepting companies on a rolling basis.
One small company FMD is working with, is United Kingdom-based
PureLiFi, which is developing secure wireless communications based on light wave technology that feeds into a Microsoft [MSFT] head-worn HoloLens mixed-reality device that FMD integrates a software product to create a “connected maintainer environment,” Trey Taylor, the director of digital innovation at FMD, told reporters.
Technicians or maintenance personnel that are wearing the head-mounted display onboard a ship equipped with PureLiFi’s light wave technology would see a “digital twin…overlaid on their engine” and allow them to view the health status of the machinery or equipment, pressures, and provide instructions for any fixes, Taylor said. The connected maintainer environment automates any resolution to an alarm on a piece of equipment and provides the step-by-step instructions to include videos and models overlaid on the particular system to simultaneously allow the user to fix the problem, he said.
The light wave technology doesn’t emit any signals, which could be an attack vector for an enemy combatant, Taylor said.
Oceus Networks, a provider of private cellular broadband networks, is also partnered with FMD. The company’s radios can be quickly deployed in deep, remote areas of a ship to get connectivity with enough capacity to support low latency voice and video communications, including high-end applications such as augmented reality. Oceus displayed a 5G cellular network in a box, the size of one piece of carry-on airline luggage.
A potential naval application would be for docked ships and could be used for maintenance or other needs. Taylor said the Oceus network dramatically cuts the time—from days to minutes—needed for field service representatives to find a fix a problem by enabling robust “reachback” to a senior FMD engineer at the company’s headquarters in Wisconsin who can quickly resolve an issue.
FMD has been surveying the industry for “disruptive technologies” that will be in demand by the Navy to “enable some of the things that they’re doing in the unmanned space and for future fleet development plans,” Taylor said.