Augmented reality for material processing within shielded radioactive environment

Safety requirement is the most important issue for operators in the filed of nuclear science, especially material processing within shielded radioactive manufacturing environment under which material processing needs a great of manual operations and any operation mistake would cause to permanent radiation threat to body of operators and loss of enormous economical value. This paper proposes a novel approach to increase this safety. The approach is base on an augmented reality framework with double-camera observation system designed according to the special structure of the shielded environment, and integrates augmented reality and finger tip interaction technology to interactively show the contexts of principles of processing devices, tools and steps in the form of texts, pictures, and animations, and also to enhance operation steps of material processing by superimposing virtual digital models onto video streams of the observation camera system. A simulation environment is set up to verify our approach. The results show the proposed approach is capable of extending viewing scopes of operators and making interactive training, and guiding complicate operations at advance so as to increase operational safety and comfort, diminish costly mistakes and improve material processing efficiency.