U.S. Navy photo by Bobby Cummings

SOURCE Defense One/Patrick Tucker: The U.S. Navy has a $20-billion rust problem. Corrosion can hinder or even disable ships and aircraft at sea. But monitoring rust is expensive — $3 billion a year — and time-intensive for a Navy that’s already undermanned. So service leaders are turning to artificial intelligence software and drone photos to automate tasks and bring down the costs, Google announced today. 

Simple Technology Solutions, a Google partner, will use “Google Cloud artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies on inspection drone-captured images to detect, prioritize, and predict its maintenance needs,” according to the statement. 

Google’s ability to identify abnormalities in images with artificial intelligence is already helping to detect cancer, find problems in wind turbines, and spot potholes in Memphis streets. In essence, if you can build up a large enough database of images of a particular type, you can train the algorithm to spot things like cellular abnormalities or rust on the side of a ship.