Development of AR Tracking Method for NPP Maintenance Work Support

Nuclear power plant (NPP) need to be maintained periodically. Improvement of maintenance work efficiency and reduction of its cost at the same time is desired. One of the state-of-the-art information technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) aims at real world rather than virtual world. Although augmented reality (AR) has a great possibility to support various works such as a maintenance work in nuclear power plants (NPPs), it is difficult to apply it to actual work support because the tracking method is the bottleneck for the practical use. In this study, a barcode marker tracking method is proposed to apply AR system for a maintenance work support in NPP field. The proposed method employs long and narrow markers which can be pasted on the pipes in plant field, and they can be easily recognized in long distance in order to reduce the number of pasted markers in the plant field. The evaluation experiment was conducted in a laboratory and plant field. The results show that (1) fast and stable tracking can be realized; (2) position error in camera view is less than 1%, which is perfect under the limitation of camera resolution; (3) the barcode markers are large and it is relatively difficult to catch two markers in one camera view especially in short distance.

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