Alongside with the increasing vehicle complexity, the functionalities related to the safety, diagnosis and maintainability have become critical. The operators of special machines such as agricultural, mining, construction vehicles might be overwhelmed by this increased complexity and, as a result, operations for the recovery or maintenance of their vehicles become difficult. The Augmented Reality (AR) seems to be a very promising technology both if applied to traditional smart-phones or to the upcoming glasses, that has been just presented to the market by several manufacturers.
This paper reviews some use cases of applications created in Institute for Agricultural and Earthmoving Machines (IMAMOTER) of the National research Council of Italy (CNR) engineers laboratories, which propose a novel approach for assisted maintenance, recovery or training. These take advantage of the use of AR, providing an efficient method for user fast learning of simple procedures as well as a support for fault recovery and maintenance in hazardous environments or work places.
In the first application scenario, the AR is used to recognize the dashboard and the machine controls in order to provide further information about them. In the second scenario the AR application is connected with a CAN-Bluetooth gateway to the SAE J1939 network and provides real-time information or messages in case of faults or anomalous conditions. Finally, a real implementation of AR technologies will be presented, that leads the user during recovery procedures, such a fuse replacement in three simple steps. The paper presents real Apps and future perspectives in the application of AR technology in Heavy-Duty vehicles.