Augmented Reality-based factory planning - an application tailored to industrial needs

Abstract

Over the past years, a variety of Augmented Reality (AR)-based applications were created, to support industrial processes. Although these first demonstrator applications or prototypes cover all parts of the industrial product process (design, planning and production, service and maintenance), only a few of them actually turned into established and applied solutions. In the automotive industry, one successful field for AR-based applications is factory design and planning. metaio and Volkswagen Group Research have concerted their research work to continuously enhance a first prototype in order to create a serviceable and accepted software tool, which is tailored to the needs of AR-based factory planning processes. This paper presents the developing process of this application, the requirements analysis and the realization as a complete system. A concrete example in industry describes the usage of the system for factory planning and an outlook on future work in this area closes the document.

Use of projector based augmented reality to improve manual spot-welding precision and accuracy for automotive manufacturing

“…They are using it for marketing products as well as for Head-Up Displays (HUD) to project information onto vehicle windscreen. BMW [14] and Volkswagen [15] have used AR on their production line, but AR is still an uncommon practice among the wider automotive industry.…”

“…Reference [20] along with [21] proposed a desktopbased AR system for manual assembly and planning process. Their systems reposition virtual models over existing plant layout to facilitate easier plant process planning.…”

A multi-sensor platform for wide-area tracking

“…Marker Tracking We decided for marker tracking as the basic tracking modality for our multi-sensor platform. Marker tracking is a well-known and widely used tracking technology in the field of Augmented Reality [6,11] As a first step we deploy several markers in the environment (where allowed) and register them to the room coordinate system such that we can rely on them as well known and reliable landmarks. The registration can either be done by using a tachymeter or taking several pictures of the markers and perform a bundle adjustment.…”

Designing a Mixed Reality Framework for Enriching Interactions in Robot Simulation

“…The work by metaio GmbH and the Volkswagen Group (Pentenrieder et al, 2007) demonstrate the application of AR in the industrial factory planning process and have reduced construction costs and improved planning reliability. Nishiwaki et al (Nishiwaki et al, 2008) propose a mixed reality environment that aids testing of robot subsystems by visualising robot, sensory information, and results from planning and vision components over the real world for a more intuitive visual feedback.…”