| Abstrakt: |
Maintenance, storage and warehousing are complex processes required in many industries such as automotive, aerospace, manufacturing and logistic companies. These processes, often, involve moving objects in crowded environments using robots or human operators. Particularly, replacement and assembly of machine parts in crowded environments when performed by a human being require high technical skills. These tasks may be performed using robots to reduce costs due to human errors and execution time. However, robots under open world assumptions could neither operate in all environments nor perform tasks not modeled by the designer. In this paper, we introduce a mixed reality system to assist human operators in moving objects in crowded environments for maintenance tasks such as: parts assembly or replacement, and storage of objects. The introduced system consists of a mobile application exploited through a hands-free VR box. The proposed Mixed Reality for Industrial Maintenance (MRIM) system enhances the perception of a human operator by overlaying 3D real world visual information and virtual objects, such as: orientation guidelines including rotating angles, moving direction and displacement of carried objects. These guidelines allow for gaining execution time, and reducing human errors that might cause industrial parts damage. The proposed work brings two main contributions. First, it makes use of a new algorithm based on recasting, named R star (R*) that allows for optimizing pathfinding in 3D space. This later outperforms the two commonly used baseline 3D pathfinding algorithms of at least 87.5% in terms of execution time. Second, MRIM provides an easy-to-use interface that exploits information provided by the R* algorithm. The experiments, conducted in real condition for the task of part replacement in a crowded environment, show that MRIM reduces considerably execution time and human errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
