GridRaster Provides Cloud-based Technology that Enhances Aviation Safety

GridRaster’s XR Cloud Platform combines the best of gaming technologies and concepts with traditional simulator capabilities to enable high-quality, multi-user, multi-domain, multi-networked AR/VR/MR experiences on commodity off-the-self devices powered by distributed cloud computing, low-latency remote rendering and 3D Artificial Intelligence (AI) based spatial mapping. (Image courtesy GridRaster)

GridRaster provides a unified and shared software infrastructure to empower enterprise customers to build and run scalable, high-quality eXtended Reality (XR) – Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) – applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds; and deliver these experiences on wireless mobile devices (such as HMD, smartphones, and tablets). This could be a game changer for aviation. In Flight USA had the pleasure of speaking with Dijam Panigrahi, Co-founder of GridRaster, about the company’s innovative platform. 

Dijam Panigrahi, COO/Co-founder of GridRaster. (Photo courtesy GridRaster)

IFUSA: Please tell us what GridRaster is all about… What do you do there? 

DP: Today if you are looking at any augmented reality and virtual reality, most of the experiences are being delivered right on the device. Then you experience what the augmented reality and virtual reality are there. One of the challenges is, if you think of Netflix, there was a time when you could only see things when the DVD was put in, then Netflix moved and you can stream everything, everything is driven from the cloud. Think of something similar to that. We are enabling the high-end experience of mixed reality and augmented realty by delivering and using the cloud to run on low-end devices. We can make that happen by leveraging the cloud. You don’t have to worry about the capacity of the device, can it support that kind of experience by leveraging that kind of computing.

IFUSA: What is your role in the company?

DP: I am one of the co-founders and the chief operating officer. Mostly I can take care of the business allotment, product management, customer requirements and mapping out internally from a technical perspective and working on the partnership and marketing for the company.

IFUSA: How did this company come about… you saw a need maybe for improved safety? How did you get started?

DP: We, the co-founders (Rishi Ranjan, CEO and Founder, and Bhaskar Banerjee, CTO and Co-Founder) come from a deep technical background and during the past 15 or so years we worked on mobile devices and the telecom network and how the cloud is involved.

We have seen the entire phase of the 3G, 4G and 5G and in some ways we have shaped some of the key things in that ecosystem. Some seven or eight years back, we started working on 5G and that was when virtual reality and augmented reality came into the picture. How do you deliver these experiences on the mobile devices was one of the key aspects of 5G and one of the key use-cases for the uptake of 5G. That’s where we first started working on AR/VR and realized that to offer the high-end experiences on the mobile device, you need to bring in a compute from somewhere outside of the device and that is cloud infrastructure… that’s when we started the company back in 2015 and it’s been a roller coaster ride but that’s how we started. 

IFUSA: What are some safety problems you are trying to address, particularly in aviation?

DP: In aviation, one of the key things when you look at the complexity of the aircraft is more and more difficult avionics systems that are being used, and this exponentially keeps increasing, while you have a kill-gap because you don’t have as many talented people joining the industry. The avionics keep becoming more complex but the skill sets of the people coming in are not keeping up. What has happened is this gap is taking more and more time to fix maintenance and trouble-shooting. That creates more mishaps and they are more fatal. In this workplace, you cannot afford to make those mistakes. This is where virtual reality and augmented reality can help. You can now train people in very complex environments giving them the hands-on experience to train in the complexities of the problems they may face. Even the U.S. Air Force, which we are working with right now, you don’t always have the physical aircraft available for someone to go and try some of the new maintenance tasks. You would have had to make due with videos. But now with AR and VR, you can do that in the virtual environment as if you are actually working on the aircraft and then you develop the muscle memory, as if in a rehearsal, you can accelerate the skill set of someone who is coming in.

The other thing, from a safety angle, is using AR; Let’s suppose we are fixing a cable wire harness. This is a very complex item and takes a lot of years of experience to really fix it well. If you get it wrong, it’s a disaster. Now with AR glass, which you are wearing, you can go through the task and you can go through all the instruction, the overlay is right in front of you, and you are now going to do the fixing process. If you are doing anything wrong, it will flag you and with the camera you will know exactly how to proceed. You will have all the data, and you will know how the task should be done. Anything being done can be immediately flagged if it is being done incorrectly and show you step-by-step what needs to be done and how to do it correctly. Effectively, any human error can be completely eliminated. Any mistake, by using the glasses and cameras can be corrected because the glasses and cameras are registering every action and that’s a huge safety boost.

IFUSA: Your technology is mainly targeted to large commercial markets like Boeing. Do you plan to market this to business and general aviation? Could it apply to those?

DP: It is absolutely going to be applicable to both general and business, as well as commercial and military, aviation. The challenge will be the value… A lot of factors need to fall in place, especially in the commercial aviation marketplace. For example, the headsets are very expensive, like $3,000 to $5,000, so what you’re trying to do is with a tablet but the tablet doesn’t have that kind of capacity. There are a few things that need to fall into place, like the digital content needs to be available. The good thing with aerospace and defense, especially in the military, is they have been spending a lot of money and have been the early adopters, so what we are effectively trying to do is tracing, evolving our product, working with the early adopters in the industry and wait for certain things in the ecosystem to fall into place, like the devices becoming more powerful and cost effective and so we absolutely know this will be applicable across the industry.

IFUSA: How is 3D spatial mapping resolving safety issues?

DP: The 3D spatial mapping… if I’m wearing a glass with a camera, the camera sees everything that is in front of me. Lets again take the case of the cable wiring harness. It sees all the complex wiring and it is able to identify each and every wire and what it means. Lets suppose I want to change something with the rotary system. It can identify that this wire is specifically for this system. While I’m working on this, the glass will overlay a virtual wire on top of the physical wire and am able to do the task specifically on this wire without touching any other wire that would not be the right thing to do. With 3D special mapping, we are able to do the overlays on the physical wires with precision, within a millimeter of precision. Also it allows me to know that if there is any deviation from the task at hand, it can automatically flag that. It allows you do to things much more precisely and absolutely eliminate errors.

IFUSA: I understand that a problem with drilled holes led to an electrical problem on board an aircraft. Can you tell us how this is helping to resolve problems like this.

DP: This is an extension of what I was saying. If you can accurately identify each and every part of what you are seeing, and you know that any deviation from the specific task can be flagged, then you will pretty much avoid the scenario of what we are talking about. It insures that you avoid a scenario where there has been a wrong step. By design, you eliminate any sort of human error, which was before very possible.

IFUSA: I know that in the scenario with the drilled hole, the aircraft went down and resulted in fatalities. It left many people afraid to fly.  How long do you think it will take to get this wide-spread and what would you tell people who are afraid to fly?

DP: A lot of things need to fall into place. Most aviation companies, in some form or another have tried this technology. Mostly, the technology has stayed in the infancy stage. One of the biggest challenges has been trying to scale the solution much more affordably. It needs to be deployable without the complexity of trying to have expensive devices when you don’t know where the content is coming from. The few things that need to come into place for the scalability to come into place, and we are solving that scalability angle, by bringing in the cloud. In terms of content, you have a single truth of data and centralized content across the life cycle of the product, from design, conceptualization, maintenance and after sale service and that is not possible without the cloud base approach.

The second is the scaling. One of the limiting factors has been the data. If you go to the aviation industry, they have a ton of data with complex large models. One of the current challenges they have is to go through this painful process of demising all this data and assets and fit it into a standard device or else it won’t run and that is really how you lose a lot of essential data that should have been retained. You lose a lot of design data, which should have been retained. You cannot really scale. What we are able to do, in terms of the data, you don’t have change anything. We onboard the data as it is and using the cloud and remote rendering capabilities. We are able to take care whatever complexity of data you bring in. We are still able to bring the whole thing on the device without losing any design intent. So one is automating that part where you bring on the data as it is and that will help the scaling purpose and then the other is you are able to scale it not based on the user or the complexity of the system because then you would have to optimize again and again.

The piece we don’t have the control over, specifically the device side of things, is that the device needs to be affordable and can be marketed at a mass level. So we are trying to address what is value-based. If I can get my aircraft maintained and trouble-shoot faster, then I can get that aircraft back up in the air, rather than sitting on the ground. The time that I save translates to hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. In this regard, then a $5,000 headset makes sense.  To come across the board and have a mass deployment, all these factors need to fall in place.

IFUSA: Do you have any other future plans for this company at this time?

DP: This market lays pretty nascent right now. What we are trying to do is not spread ourselves too wide and thin and focus on the two or three industries we are involved with right now, aerospace and defense, aviation and the automotive industry. We want to evolve the product on these industries. As we become purpose-built on a specific industry, then we can find a consensus to it. For example, there is a lot of similarity when you are deploying a system in aviation and the military environment. For example, security is a huge concern, as it is to a medical application. There is a lot of security data related that needs to be taken care of. So when the time is right, we’ll address that but for the next two to three years we have enough on our plate.

IFUSA: Is there anything else you would like to add?

DP: I would like to add that in terms of realizing the potential of this medium, augmented realty, virtual reality or mixed reality, a lot has changed over the past 18-24 months. More specifically with the pandemic, the XR provides you the next best option to being physically there. While the pandemic has overall run the economy into the ground, in a way it has been a boost for the digital transformation piece and one of the huge components has been the capability of AR, VR and XR. That is something we’re seeing now and companies are no longer looking at this as a temporary solution but as a strategic advantage, where they can reach benefits over the years to come.

IFUSA: Thank you.

To learn more about GridRaster, based in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, visit their website: www.gridraster.com.