Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Inspection
Enhancing transportation inspections through augmented reality.
Project Overview
Updated March 31, 2023
The Problem
The inspection of aircraft is a constant and critical part of commercial aviation operations.
To ensure accuracy and continuity in equipment inspections, inspectors rely on written records and photographs of an aircraft generated by previous inspectors. Damage and repairs are often manually mapped by aircraft mechanics and technicians, and information must be double or triple-checked to ensure location accuracy.
How We Are Solving It
The Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Inspection project is focused on streamlining and improving this process. Made up of Boeing Vancouver, Unity Technologies and Simon Fraser University, the project team is researching the viability of creating an augmented reality (AR) capability for aircraft maintenance and inspection.
The group is developing a specialized AR engine to allow inspectors to more quickly and easily evaluate a plane and compare its present-day and previous states, using current and historic data.
The initial focus involves repairs to airplane surfaces. Learnings from this project could lead to other applications that leverage AR for the inspection of large objects across the transportation industry and beyond.
The Result
This project undertook the designing of an augmented reality algorithm that could accurately map a 3D model on top of a real-world aircraft image in order to improve the safety, accuracy and cost of inspections of these very large objects and its research laid the groundwork to visualize important repair and maintenance records for an aircraft live and in 3D, leading to more efficient and intuitive inspections of aircraft.
Project Lead
Project Partners
-
"When the price of technology comes down, you'll be able to walk around a rental car or a broken lawnmower with an iPad or AR smart glasses and look for defects. Without the Superclusters involvement, it would have been much more difficult to connect with the machine learning and vision researchers at SFU and the world leaders in synthetic imagery at Unity."
Managing Director, Boeing Canada Read our Impact Story