The US Navy has completed the First-ever Repair Engineering Exercise (REPTX)-2022 to demonstrate and evaluate several ship maintenance techniques.

REPTX was held from August 22nd to September 1st at Naval Station Ventura County, Ventura County, California.

It was sponsored by the Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA) Naval Systems Engineering and Logistics Directorate Technology Office (05T).

The event was attended by teams from over 60 technology companies, government agencies, and academic laboratories from around the world.

All activities and experiments in this exercise were conducted on a retired US Navy Spruance-class destroyer (also known as the Self Defense Test Ship).

The latest iteration of the exercise aims to test and confirm the ability of the ship to perform real fleet maintenance and combat damage repairs during operations.

Participants tested technologies addressing four areas including visualization, command and control, forward manufacturing, and expedition maintenance.

NAVSEA 05T Sustain Technology Program Manager Janice Bryant said:

“Many problems require complex solutions, and multiple participants have independent pieces of that solution.”

About 20 reservists from the U.S. Navy’s Surge Maintenance Program also attended REPTX, getting hands-on experience with remote-controlled robots and watching videos on augmented reality headsets to learn about various repair processes.

Activities performed by reservists included using ultrasound to measure metal wear depth, detangling dirty propellers, identifying objects on the sides of the hull, and inspecting tight spaces inaccessible to humans. It was

Various companies have tested unmanned aerial vehicles to identify problems such as corrosion and look for misplaced objects.

Other scenarios included evaluation of various inspection and repair tools, ship-to-shore communication systems, and surface and underwater visualization devices.