A Fog Computing and Cloudlet Based Augmented Reality System for the Industry 4.0 Shipyard

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the key technologies pointed out by Industry 4.0 as a tool for enhancing the next generation of automated and computerized factories. AR can also help shipbuilding operators, since they usually need to interact with information (e.g., product datasheets, instructions, maintenance procedures, quality control forms) that could be handled easily and more efficiently through AR devices. This is the reason why Navantia, one of the 10 largest shipbuilders in the world, is studying the application of AR (among other technologies) in different shipyard environments in a project called “Shipyard 4.0”. This article presents Navantia’s industrial AR (IAR) architecture, which is based on cloudlets and on the fog computing paradigm. Both technologies are ideal for supporting physically-distributed, low-latency and QoS-aware applications that decrease the network traffic and the computational load of traditional cloud computing systems. The proposed IAR communications architecture is evaluated in real-world scenarios with payload sizes according to demanding Microsoft HoloLens applications and when using a cloud, a cloudlet and a fog computing system. The results show that, in terms of response delay, the fog computing system is the fastest when transferring small payloads (less than 128 KB), while for larger file sizes, the cloudlet solution is faster than the others. Moreover, under high loads (with many concurrent IAR clients), the cloudlet in some cases is more than four times faster than the fog computing system in terms of response delay.