Polaris Awarded Research Contract for AI Safety Platform

The office of the under secretary of defense has awarded a small business innovation research (SBIR) contract to Polaris Aero for development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for its Vocus safety intelligence platform. “We’re applying AI technology to make safety management systems more insightful and useful,” said Steve Bruneau, Polaris Aero’s v-p of aviation software for risk analysis and safety management systems (SMS).

The Phoenix-based company has been working with AI for about 10 months, he said, “and we’re starting to do more with it.” He explained that none of the information that Polaris Aero gathers from aircraft operators and customers is shared with publicly available AI platforms. Much of the work on the SBIR contract will also benefit the company’s work with commercial customers.

According to Polaris, AI will improve the process since the safety officer can push information into the SMS and conduct root-cause analysis. While the AI won’t provide final reports, it speeds up the safety officer’s work by filling in information needed for safety reports and helps generate lessons-learned summaries. This enables the safety officer to “communicate knowledge rather than writing reports,” Bruneau said.

“One of the benefits of Vocus is to centralize all things safety. Traditional programs are siloed, and this…boils down what’s useful and actionable.” Too many lengthy reports generate too much information and make it hard to pull out helpful guidance, he explained.

The SBIR funding is for all branches of the military, but only for flight-related activities. All information is stored in a government-secure cloud. As the end user, the military helps shape the requirements of the contract. “They use it in a prototyping way to validate the program,” he said. “The government is a partner in that regard.”

Once the government signs off on the contract achieving its goals, then an acquisition phase would be next, and, presuming a successful conclusion, the military would roll it out across all its branches and aviation activities.

An example of the Vocus FlightRisk risk assessment is Polaris Aero’s risk ratings. “All customers have the ability to submit those about airports they’ve been into,” Bruneau said. Pilots might report an issue at a particular airport, and Vocus uses AI to summarize these risk ratings. “We look at all data sources and have AI boil it down to information you need to know,” he said. “It’s vital to avoid information overload. Risk ratings have been around a long time, but applying AI gives them a new value proposition. You’re not sifting through 12 reports on Teterboro, now you’re getting a summary based on [pilots’] inputs.”

Another way AI will help Vocus users is to surface important information, but at a much later date, when enough time has passed that a pilot might have forgotten that particular problem. “How are you going to remember that mistake two years from now?” he asked. “When you put it in Vocus, up comes that information. There’s more benefit from lessons learned. From an organizational standpoint, all pilots benefit from the lessons from each pilot. Think about turnover, how do you make sure the new guy is up to speed? By bringing [the information] to every pilot, ensuring consistency, and sharing lessons learned. To date, we rely on humans to remember everything, [which is hard] with the onslaught of information today.”