Expert-Assisted Field Maintenance using Augmented Reality
(Room S320B)
28 Nov 17
3:00 PM
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3:30 PM
In 2016, the US military had an operation and maintenance budget of almost USD $200 billion, the largest budget of any appropriation category. As such, it is imperative to minimize errors and costs when performing maintenance tasks. Unfortunately, the military may not always have enough skilled technicians on hand to send to all maintenance sites. Because of this, warfighters must often perform maintenance on systems outside their area of expertise. Augmented reality (AR) has been shown to effectively deliver context-aware instructions, reducing the time needed to identify suitable maintenance steps by more than 50%. However, even with the use of AR, it would be impractical to create maintenance instructions for each unique piece of machinery. By connecting a remote warfighter to a skilled technician, a plethora of maintenance knowledge can be quickly transferred in a targeted manner.
This paper details a mobile application that puts both the power of AR and the knowledge of a technician directly into the hands of a warfighter in the field. A mobile application was developed using the Unity3D game engine that enables technicians to use AR to visually share maintenance knowledge with a remote warfighter. A live camera feed of the warfighter’s immediate area is streamed to the technician. Observing this feed, the technician sends back real-time maintenance guidance in the form of augmented 3D models and animations, selected from a list or created dynamically. Once received by the remote warfighter, the augmentations are overlaid onto the physical object, and the technician-recommended maintenance step is visible to the warfighter. While there has been ample research regarding AR-assisted processes, little focus has been given to leveraging the detailed knowledge of existing personnel. This paper discusses the application development and technical evaluation to ensure real-time connectivity in geographically distributed locations.