NSF Award #2326187$2M+ FundedClemson University2023 – Present

AI & XR for Aircraft Maintenance Technicians

A multi-stage research program — from qualitative barrier investigation to prototyping, multimodal AI systems, and safety risk analysis — aimed at making AI and XR adoption safe and effective in high-stakes aviation maintenance.

Four Stages of Research

Stage 01

Investigating Barriers

What prevents aircraft maintenance technicians from adopting AI and XR tools?

43 AMTs · Semi-structured interviews · 17 major barriers identified

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Stage 02

Design & Development

Goal-directed task analysis, concept selection, and high-fidelity prototyping.

GDTA · Concept selection · Interactive Figma prototype

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Stage 03

MRAG Pipeline

A multimodal retrieval-augmented generation system for the Cessna 172 maintenance manual.

92.9% Recall@5 · 87.2% BERT F-1 · GPT-4.1 · $0.009/query

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Stage 04

AI-XR Risk Framework

A human-centered FMEA and decision-point analysis of AI-XR failure modes in safety-critical domains.

FMEA · SHERPA · 25 failure modes · 4 risk themes

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