Piping installation support system using augmented reality

Abstract

In this paper, authors introduce an AR application which supports a pipe drawing work in a shop floor of a shipyard. Some pieces of pipes are not designed beforehand in ship design process, as they contain uncertainty caused by pipe production and assembly in a factory. These pipes are usually designed and fabricated individually in a shop floor by the method that is far from be digitalized. The piping work of gauging pipes takes an immense amount of time. Because those works are composed of 3 processes, measurement of relative position of both ends of flanges, design of the pipe and confirmation of the piping design. In order to reduce the time of those piping work, the authors have developed the AR application which can design the gaging pipes automatically. The AR application measures the location of both ends of the pipe using image processing, automatically draws a suitable shape of the pipe, and effectively illustrates graphics of the pipe as AR once the worker holds a tablet PC to the direction he wants to fix the pipe. The paper explains details of above AR applications, including those system diagrams, and shows some results of demonstration for easy understanding how they work.

Keywords

• augmented reality
• piping installation
• shipbuilding
• automatic design