Development and performance testing of the world’s first automated individual body armor inspection system

With the onset of conflict and large troop deployments into South West Asia in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Radiography Laboratory at the US Army Armaments, Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ, USA, was approached to investigate the feasibility of designing an automated inspection system to examine the integrity of all the small arms ceramic armor plates currently in service. This amounted to ~1 million units; therefore, the need for a high-throughput, fully automated system was apparent, and this included automated defect recognition software and automated material handling.