Augmented Reality for Enabling Smart Nuclear Infrastructure

Abstract

This work presents a novel, comprehensive framework that leverages emerging augmented reality headset technology to enable smart nuclear industrial infrastructure that a human can easily interact with to improve their performance in terms of safety, security, and productivity. Nuclear industrial operations require some of the most complicated infrastructure that must be managed today. Nuclear infrastructure and their associated industrial operations typically features stringent requirements associated with seismic, personnel management (e.g., access control, equipment access), safety (e.g., radiation, criticality, mechanical, electrical, spark, and chemical hazards), security (cyber/physical), and sometimes international treaties for nuclear non-proliferation. Furthermore, a wide variety of manufacturing and maintenance operations take place within these facilities further complicating their management. Nuclear facilities require very thorough and stringent documentation of the operations occurring within these facilities as well as maintaining a tight chain-of-custody for the materials being stored within the facility. The emergence of augmented reality and a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices offers a possible solution to help mitigate these challenges. This work provides a demonstration of a prototype smart nuclear infrastructure system that leverages augmented reality to illustrate the advantages of this system. It will also present example augmented reality tools that can be leveraged to create the next generation of smart nuclear infrastructure. The discussion will layout future directions of research for this class of work.

Enabling human–infrastructure interfaces for inspection using augmented reality

“…The UI is controlled by hand gestures and voice commands making the application more intuitive and immersive. This application has been successfully demonstrated in a smart inspection of a nuclear facility in previous research by the same authors Mascaren˜as et al 61 The results of these experiments are as follows:…”

The renaissance of augmented reality in construction: history, present status and future directions

“…Ahn et al (2019) proposed a two-step method, including image segmentation for filtering out the markers and object detection for estimating the coordinates, to perform geometric transformation for projection-based display. Mascareñas et al (2019) adopted various types of markers (e.g., barcode, QR code) in order to cope with the common occurrence of facilities in nuclear infrastructure. Although marker-based methods are relatively straightforward to use, they require markers being placed at suitable locations without any occlusions.…”

“…However, only three recent studies reported success cases of hybrid interaction in construction. In these studies, users were asked to wear the head-mounted device (i.e., Microsoft HoloLens) and interact with the virtual contents by their gestures (Baek et al , 2019; Mascareñas et al , 2019). Despite the diverse interaction mechanisms, no study has used speech or eye movement as inputs for intuitive interaction, leaving a possibility for further investigation.…”

Machine learning and structural health monitoring overview with emerging technology and high-dimensional data source highlights

“…Virtual reality (VR) refers to computer technologies and interfaces to simulate a 3D and interactive environment; whereas, augmented reality (AR) implies layering virtual information on real-world objects. 343 Initially inspired and developed for the gaming community, VR and AR are now finding their way into other fields, such as nuclear facilities 344 or medical fields. 345 In SHM systems, such novel approaches are becoming a trend.…”