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Augmented Reality To Help Mechanics Fix Vehicles

Posted by timothy on from the insert-overlaid-part-a-into-slot-b dept.

kkleiner writes "ARMAR, or Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair, is a head mounted display unit that provides graphic overlays to assist you in making repairs. An Android phone provides an interface to control the graphics you view during the process. Published in IEEE, and recently tested with the United States Marine Corps on an armored turret, ARMAR can cut maintenance times in half by guiding users to the damaged area and displaying 3D animations to demonstrate the appropriate tools and techniques."

12 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Looks Neat by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Informative
    disclaimer: I'm a former military backshop avionics technician

    That technology looks to be pretty cool and excellent for routine maintenance, but I can see how it would suck for troubleshooting. For example the video in TFA locates a cable and instructs the user to unscrew it. With all that fancy visual stuff going on, it could be easy for the technician to overlook a pushed pin or a pinch in the cable which could be causing a problem. The small screen on a wrist-mounted phone would not be sufficient to display the necessary detail. The solution as-is is not suitable for finer military electronics which are tangled messes of RF hardlines, circuit cards, and even wire-wrapped backplanes. A full-size LCD to the side showing 3-D animation would be much more suitable for that. Additionally,

    In the Marine Corps tests, the pair of researchers used 10 cameras in the vehicle

    Which works fine for vehicles, but would totally suck for aircraft. Did the guys who came up with the statistics factor in the time it takes to set up and/or calibrate the camera array? Of course, embedding a few sensors within the vehicle and setting up the display's position with respect to them would be much easier.

    1. Re:Looks Neat by Anachragnome · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Now you just plug in to the on-board diagnostic system, and 9 times out of 10 it'll tell you exactly what the problem is."

      That sounds like the same thing I hear people say about automotive scanners. "Just plug it in and it tells you exactly what is wrong!" That is a bunch of hogwwash. Scanners simply give the tech diagnostic codes, and in some cases allow for viewing certain circuits and their current (or stored) values. It simply gives you a direction to look.

      For example, a scanner might have found a stored code for an oxygen sensor fault that indicates the engine is running full rich at all times (and even show voltage values that reflect this) when the real problem is a fuel injector with it's pintle jammed open by a sliver of metal left in the fuel rail during manufacturing. There is NO way in hell that the scanner will know anything about that sliver of metal. BUT, a good mechanic will know what types of failures can cause a full rich condition and start ruling them out one at a time. The code is merely a starting point.

      This device will not give a mechanic the sudden ability to know all the possible causes, nor will it always tell them the truth. False codes are a real problem that are usually ruled out BEFORE any further diagnosis occurs (usually by pulling codes followed by clearing them and seeing which ones come back).

      There is not a device on this planet that can replace a good diagnostician simply because every possible failure is impossible to foresee.

    2. Re:Looks Neat by Anachragnome · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Replacing an ECU (PCM, same thing) is a tricky venture sometimes.

      Being the honest mechanic, I usually offered an alternative to my customers. I let them decide after explaining.

      I had a roughly 50% success rate of fixing these cars--cars that all testing seemed to indicate a wonky/bad ECU--by simply taking the circuit board out of the ECU housing (carefully!) and giving it a gentle twist on two different axis, then re-installing it.

      50% of the time the problem went away, never to return. The other 50% of the time it ended up needing replacement eventually. If the customer didn't mind the risk of the problem re-occuring they usually went for the twist test. Saved my customers thousands of dollars.

      I have no idea why this fixes some ECUs. Since all the connections are board-soldered, I can olny assume stressing the internals of some component on the board was enough to get it back in spec. Weird, I know.

      My own Chrysler Town and Country had this "repair" done to it to solve an intermittent turn signal loss...4 years ago...and it still works.

      Since figuring this out, I do this on ANY malfunctioning device with circuit boards...take them out, give 'em a twist and re-install them. It often fixes the problem. Fixed a laptop, two PCs, a stereo amplifier and a snowmachine this way.

  2. locating parts on vehicle by pig_man1899 · · Score: 4, Funny

    How do I use this thing to locate the muffler bearings my service shop says need replacing?

    --
    The manifest absurdity of it is too obvious to require explanation
    1. Re:locating parts on vehicle by MadShark · · Score: 3, Funny

      I once got a friend of mine to believe there was such a thing as blinker fluid. It just so happened that another friend had his car parked outside with a cracked tail light. It had rained heavily earlier that day and water had leaked in and filled the blinker right up to where the lens was cracked. She was calling bullshit until we took her outside and showed her. She bought it hook, line and sinker after seeing it. We caught hell later, but it was a lot of fun.

  3. will it be like other AR? by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cut approaching.
    Cut approaching.
    Cut here.
    Cut here.
    You have cut the wrong wire.
    Recalculating...
    Recalculating...
    Get soldering iron.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  4. On the down side by sehlat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We are very likely to see people like the major auto manufacturers providing this sort of
    thing ONLY to their authorized dealers, and possibly trying to claim that any repair information
    of any kind is copyrighted, just like they've done with the diagnostic codes on the black boxes.

  5. Another dealer profit center. by WhatDoIKnow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't comment on military applications, but I do have 30 years experience in mobile equipment and vehicle maintenance and fleet management. Despite the OBD 2, the major vehicle producers are increasingly requiring proprietary information and specialized tools for what could be simple routine repairs and maintenance. The described system could be a boon to technicians but my cynical view is that it will just be turned into another income source for vehicle manufacturers and dealer service departments. On many cars now you can't even change a coolant hose without a substantial investment in a "hose fitting disconnect kit", let alone accessing any non-generic DTCs from OBD2 or CAN. And of course Ford, Honda, GM, Toyota etc. are all different.

  6. Boeing by JaneTheIgnorantSlut · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Boeing started using this tech in the early 90's to help assemble cables in aircraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

  7. Re:Hello by frosty_tsm · · Score: 4, Funny

    welcome to Windows Mechanical, I see you have picked up a wrench, please wait while Microsoft Clippy WrenchBuddy .NET SP 6 is downloaded.

    Not quite. They used the Android to power it, so it'd be closer to:

    [Repair] [I'm Feeling Lucky]

  8. Re:Wait a minute! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Robots with an approximately human combination of strength and fine dexterity are somewhere on the line between "fucking expensive" and "not out of the lab yet". They can beat the hell out of humans in situations where you design the whole scenario around them; but they are weak for general purpose work.

    Humans with an approximately human combination of strength and fine dexterity are so cheap that we routinely let the unneeded ones starve to death.

  9. Re:Wait a minute! by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Obligatory link to story detailing the reduction of humans to a mere servo in the machine.