Raytheon, Uptake bring AI to Marines' M88 maintenance

March 23 (UPI) -- Raytheon Co. announced a partnership on Monday with software company Uptake to provide predictive maintenance capabilities for Marine Corps' M88 vehicles.

Raytheon said it will provide the technical ability for onboard recording, processing and transfer of large quantities of sensitive data for the armored recovery vehicles, and Chicago-based Uptake will offer a suite of advanced artificial intelligence software.

M88s are used to recover other armored vehicles, and are the largest of recovery vehicles in use by the U.S. armed forces.

The new approach to vehicle maintenance supersedes current timeline-driven or event-driven maintenance and logistics decisions. Armies around the world are increasingly reliant on a proactive maintenance model using advanced data analytics monitoring to identify problems before they occur, a Raytheon statement said on Monday.

"To shift from reactive to predictive maintenance requires advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies," said Brad Kewell of Uptake. "We want to radically improve mission readiness, success and safety for deployed Marines at the tactical edge."

Uptake software has successfully monitored major component subsystems of the U.S. Army's Bradley Fighting Vehicle since 2018, the company said, identifying possible systems problems weeks before an actual failure and with higher accuracy than previous methods.