Mobile Augmented Reality Application for Monitoring Industrial Systems

Augmented Reality (AR) applications have constantly evolved during the past few years in the mobile technology field. The potential of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) permits to enrich the reality with digital information by integrating the physical context of the user, localization-based data, mobile embedded sensors and Internet connectivity makes out of MAR a promising technology to be used in a wide range of real use cases. Nowadays the AR communities are growing and more companies are investing in Virtual Reality (VR) and MAR technologies. Lots of applications have been developed for medical, military, entertainment, manufacturing and industrial environments. Besides this, with the exponential grow up of the mobile market, this type of applications are becoming closer to final users. This work not only details the fundaments and concepts of AR but also describes the design and implementation of a MAR application within the area of industrial systems, specifically for the domain of discrete manufacturing. The application is designed to be used in mobile devices and special attention was taken, by using the latest technological trends in this area. The developed MAR application is intended to be used by people working with Manufacturing Systems (MS), allowing an intuitive and better visualization of huge amounts of data which are generated in the industrial system. An industrial testbed was used for testing this diploma work. Several tracking patterns were deployed along the production line to create points where the user can experience an AR interaction. The MAR application displays 3D objects in front of the user view by tracking the AR markers using di erent visualization gadgets, mobile devices or smart wearable devices (AR glasses). The developed application is designed based on the requirements and specifications of a project named: Pro-active decision support for data-intensive environments (ASTUTE), supported by the European Union (EU). The final results of the implemented application is included as a part of ASTUTE, in the demonstrator of virtual control room for building and manufacturing process management