AI Company Develops YouTube for Navy Training Platform

ARLINGTON, Virginia — Artificial intelligence company MARi recently introduced a video training platform that brings AI-enhanced maintenance and repair tutorials to Navy sailors on demand. 

 

For maintenance and repair tasks that are critically important but underutilized, skills can deteriorate with disuse. Research has shown that manual, hands-on tasks are more effectively learned and retained through multimedia, not just text, said Jimmy King, product manager at MARi. 

 

Funded by a grant from the Office of Naval Research, the Step-By-Step Tutorial Engine for Performance Readiness, or STEPR, essentially functions as a “secure, internal YouTube” for the Navy, where AI-enhanced tutorial videos of maintenance and repair tasks can be accessed on demand, King said at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium in January. 

 

The tutorials use AI and large language models to continuously and automatically verify the accuracy of the multimedia video content, ensuring that it is always up to date with the latest version of the Navy’s technical publications.  

 

A human in the loop serves as a final fact-checker. Once the video content is created or crowd-sourced by the Navy, STEPR ingests the content. AI reviews it, comparing the video and audio transcript with the service’s technical publication. Once the AI approves the tutorial, the human operator makes the final call as to whether or not the tutorial is approved. Additionally, whenever the AI makes changes to the aligned technical publication, the video is automatically flagged for another AI and human operator review.

 

“Between 80 and 98 percent of the time, the AI accurately identifies what’s in the video. We’re keeping a human in the loop because that person can fact-check the AI,” King said. “It’s essentially the person … that’s reviewing the video and the AI are basically fact-checking each other, and we’re making it easier for the human in the loop to do their job.”

 

MARi is currently looking for an operational partner to conduct a pilot project. Its use case for the Office of Naval Research grant was F/A-18 maintenance, but King said the platform applies to ship maintenance and repair as well. 

 

“If we can effectively identify what the best practices are and scale them, then we get increased uptime, discrepancies flagged and fixed and safer aircraft,” he said. ND

 

Topics: Navy News