Augmented Reality System for Virtual Training of Parts Assembly

The term ‘augmented reality’ is not as widespread as the term virtual reality. Augmented reality has become very popular with cheap “smart devices”. There are many more applications for manufacturing companies such as logistics, evaluation of workshop layout, prototyping and virtual training. Cheap and easy to implement virtual training support is the goal of this work. The proposed system uses a conventional webcamera to shoot a referential workplace with a worker. There is a characteristic marker on the assembly table. The software environment can define a plane and transpose data according to the position of this marker in the real world space. The proposed software solution processes the webcamera image data and adds virtual 3D model instructions to the real image. The final image is presented on a monitor placed in front of the worker. We were able to measure a time improvement in assembly tasks using proposed system in comparison with classic methods.