Augmented reality for manufacturing planning

The shortening of development cycles demand for efficient methods and tools for the planning of complex production systems. Recently immersive Virtual Reality technologies have been introduced to the manufacturing planning functions. This has lead to a decrease in planning times as well as to the improvement of the quality of planning results. The introduction of various virtual planning tools is targeting the complete integration of all planning tasks and demands an intuitive interaction with complex computer models of machinery, factory-layouts etc. Known methods and tools are limited to a purely virtual representation of planning objects and thus require the complete modeling of the production system. The high costs reduce the possible benefits of these tools and this technology in general. New potential for the improvement of the industrial planning process are offered by the AR-technology. Using AR-techniques an physically existing production environment can be superimposed with virtual planning objects. Planning tasks can thus be validated without modeling the surrounding environment of the production site. In this contribution we discuss the support of manufacturing planning tasks with the Augmented Reality technology. We present potential benefits and describe the development of an prototypical AR-System for the support of planning tasks.