SIT Learning Factory

posted on 24 Jun 2021 by Alvin

Augmented objects for Industry 4.0 applications.

Brief

Digitization has brought about revolution in diverse aspects of industrialization, ranging from office automation to digitalized supply chain.

In recent years, industrial companies have begun to explore the use of Industry 4.0 technologies to fundamentally transform the way manufacturing is done and how processes may be efficiently tracked to optimize resource allocations.

As part of the applied teaching and learning pedagogy that SIT embraces, we acquired and setup the SIT Learning Factory to demonstrate various aspects of Industry 4.0. Importantly, it provides a platform on which students may learn and appreciate how complex systems are integrated, with myriads of sensors transferring data using industry protocols such as OPC-UA and Modbus.

This project looks into the benefits of employing immersive technology to enable students and operators of the SIT Learning Factory to visualize and operate the manufacturing processes using augmented objects layered over the physical machines. These augmented objects serve to provide contextualized information on the processes that the user is viewing through an AR headset.

Through interacting with these virtualized objects, the user is able to interactively peek into the physical object’s characteristics and data, and if required, to invoke commands to the augmented objects to control the system (e.g., in the image below).

peek

Members

Outputs

A working AR Learning Factory at SIT@NYP.

Acknowledgements

This work is funded by an SIT Strategic Initiative grant.