A context-aware augmented reality system to assist the maintenance operators

The increasing complexity and the technology advancement of equipment pose challenges to the maintenance operators nowadays. In this paper, a context-aware augmented reality (AR) system is proposed to assist the operators in routine and ad hoc maintenance tasks by providing them with context relevant information. This system integrates AR technology and context-awareness. It is able to analyze the contexts of the maintenance tasks and provide relevant and useful information to the operators through rendering the information on the real equipment and environment. In addition, the authoring of context-aware AR contents, which is essential for developing such applications, is explored. The properties of AR contents and their contextadaptation schemes are discussed, and a low-level authoring approach is proposed for constructing context-aware AR information. Finally, a case study is conducted to evaluate the system performance, and the results demonstrated that the system can adapt to dynamic maintenance situations to provide context relevant information to assist the maintenance operators.