Mobile Augmented Reality as a Field-Assistance Tool in Urban Maintenance
Nov 2021
We present a mobile AR application designed to be used by urban maintenance workers as a field-assistance tool. Using any standard smartphone camera, our system can accurately detect the desired equipment and augment it with relevant information and step-by-step instructions on how to do any required maintenance jobs. Alongside this mobile application, we also developed a desktop application for creating and authoring the data and augmentations that should be displayed during a given job (Archer). This paper proposes a novel approach to automatically detect and minimize the amount of points (checkpoints) at which the app will ask the user to perform a new equipment recognition, which are useful in order to maintain tracking stability as the user modifies the real-world object during the course of the job. The experiments and user tests demonstrate the accuracy and practicality of the developed systems, which can effectively be used to greatly improve the workflow of urban maintenance workers.
