Providing guidance for maintenance operations using automatic markerless augmented reality system

A real-time Augmented Reality system that assists in maintenance is presented (Figure 1). The novelty of the proposed system relies on its ability of being a complete framework that is self supplied. All the data is extracted automatically during an offlne phase from a collection of 3D parts that are provided as untextured 3D triangle meshes. Our disassembly planning module computes the assembly/disassembly sequence finding collision-free trajectories [1]. Moreover, some basic geometric features, such as edges and junctions, are extracted to address the tracking problem. Additionally, these geometric features let us perform the 3D model recognition, which solves the first camera pose problem and performs the recovery in case of tracking failure [3]. During the online phase, these geometric features are used to build a markerless tracking that updates continuously the camera pose from a monocular image. This markerless tracking combines an edge tracker, a point based tracker and a 3D particle filter to offer a robust 3D tracking against undesirable conditions [2]. Once the camera pose has been computed, the system offers an augmented instruction, indicating how to assemble/disassemble the next part. Thus, the proposed AR system is a complete framework that runs in real-time and tries to facilitate the work of workers, replacing the paper-based documentation.