Makoto YAMAUCHI^* and Kazuyo IWAMOTO

Digital Manufacturing Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8564, Japan

(Received September 2, 2009; Accepted January 7, 2010)

Line heating is a skilled task in shipbuilding to shape the outer plates of ship hulls. Real-time information on the deformation of the plates during the task would be helpful to workers performing this process. Therefore, we herein propose an interactive scheme for supporting workers performing line heating; the system provides such information through an optical shape measurement instrument combined with an augmented reality (AR) system. The instrument was designed and fabricated so that the measured data were represented using coordinates based on fiducial markers. Since the markers were simultaneously used in the AR system for the purpose of positioning, the data could then be displayed to the workers through a head-mounted display as a virtual image overlaid on the plates. Feedback of the shape measurement results was thus performed in real time using the proposed system.

Key words: optical shape measurement, augmented reality, AR, task support, real-time feedback, line heating, fiducial marker, head-mounted display

^*E-mail address: m.yamauchi@aist.go.jp