Development of Educational System for Automotive Engineering based on Augmented Reality

In this paper, an augmented reality system for automotive engineering education is introduced. Main objective of the system is teaching disassemble/assemble procedure of automatic transmission of a vehicle to students, who study automotive engineering. System includes vehicle transmission, set of tools and mechanical facilities, two video cameras, computer with developed software, HMD glasses and two LCD screens. Developed software gives instructions on assembling and disassembling processes of real vehicle transmission with the help of augmenting virtual reality objects on the video stream. Overlaying of 3D instructions on the technological workspace can be used as an interactive educational material. In disassembling process, mechanical parts which should be disassembled are augmented on video stream from video cameras. Same is done for assembling process. Animation and other visual effects are applied for better indication of the current assembling/disassembling instruction. During learning and training, student can see what parts of vehicle transmission and in which order should be assembled or disassembled. Required tools and technological operations are displayed to a student with the help of augmented reality, as well. As a result, the system guides a student step-by-step through an assembly/disassembly sequence. During educational process a student has an opportunity to return back to any previous instruction if it is necessary. Developed augmented reality system makes educational process more interesting and intuitive. Using of augmented reality system for engineering education in automotive technology makes learning process easier and financially more effective. Introduction Modern science and technology requires high quality of engineering education. Therefore, developing new interactive educational systems based on achievements of information technologies is a challenging issue. Application of augmented reality technology is on of the possible ways for improving educational process. Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. One of the first applications of the augmented reality technology was first introduced by T. Caudell in 1992 [1]. It was used for to improve the efficiency and quality of human workers in their performance of manufacturing activities. Augmented reality quickly became popular among researchers, engineers, designers, etc. It was successfully applied in robotics [2], medicine [3], automotive and aerospace engineering [4], and many other areas [5]. One of the possible applications of augmented reality is shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 Augmented reality technology is used for architecture and design. There have been several researches and projects on application of augmented reality in educational and training system. Interactive virtual laboratory for training was presented in [6]. In [7], augmented reality was used for guiding and evaluating of easy assembling process. Experimental evaluation of augmented reality in object assembly task was done in [8]. More advanced user interface based on augmented reality was proposed in [9]. As it was shown in previous researches, augmented reality is a useful tool for improving educational and training systems in assembling guiding tasks. However, in previous applications of augmented reality were used only in easy assembling operations. In this paper, we are going to describe the educational training system for assembling and disassembling of automatic vehicle transmission based on augmented reality technology. First, we briefly introduce augmented reality technology and proposed system’s structure in section “System structure”. Second, algorithm of assembling an disassembling with the help of augmented reality is described. Then, application of developed educational system is presented. Future work and conclusion are given at last.