Collaborative Augmented Reality for increased efficiency and interactivity of infrastructure maintenance and inspection

Report, 2022

Today, inspections of transport infrastructure and maintenance operations rely to a large extent on manual, analogue and fragmented processes which consequently make the current approach time consuming, inefficient and costly. A digital upgrade of the inspection protocols, methods, and workflows, which have not changed for decades, is urgently needed to increase the efficiency of on-site structural condition assessment. Together with industrial partners, Chalmers University is tackling this challenge by utilising the latest advancements in sensing technology together with the recent developments within the field of ICT. As part of the Chalmers research concept “Sensor driven cloud-based strategies for infrastructure management (SensIT)” we aim at developing a collaborative Augmented Reality (AR) tool for infrastructure inspection and maintenance. The tool will include functionalities to retrieve, analyse and visualise infrastructure data, as well as functionalities for on-site guided inspection and annotation, thereby greatly simplifying and optimizing the inspection process. The project will focus on the needs of end-users such as consultancies and the Swedish Transport Administration by actively engaging our partners in the design, evaluation and on-site testing of the AR tool. We believe that the here proposed integration of AR tools within a structural health monitoring framework has the potential to radically change the way inspections are done today. The digitisation of the entire information flow - BIM/GIS data, sensor data, in-situ simulation results, annotation, inspection history - will greatly reduce the time and costs of inspection processes and will guarantee a simplified and transparent workflow that even non-expert operators will be able to use.