Augmented Reality Route Guidance – Real-time navigation on the shopfloor

Having the right material at the right place at a specific time is the core task of intralogistics. Optimized route guidance plays a crucial role to efficiently connect warehouse and place of consumption in order to minimize waste. While experienced employees are rather proficient at finding the shortest route, new employees need more time to find the exact destination of their next delivery, resulting on more frequent misdeliveries.

Especially for companies with a high process- and product variance, this poses severe challenges for logistics personnel. A solution that is both intuitive to operate and understandable without language barriers was to be created. Apart from existing assets, e.g. shopfloor tables, no additional investments into factory infrastructure should be necessary.

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In cooperation with Bossard and PTC, we realized a service-driven and easy-to-operate route guidance in the demonstration factory. A 3D scan of the whole shopfloor with a Matterport camera is the basis, giving us a digital representation of all routes and assets on-site.

Based on this scan, a route guidance that runs on any android tablet was developed in unity. The coordinates of all assets as well as the order data is located in a cloud from Bossard and can be sent directly to the shopfloor worker from the interactive supply chain platform ARIMS. Information from the tablet camera is processed via PTC Vuforia, the worker is located precisely on the shopfloor. The whole tablet screen is used for the route guidance. In the upper corner, the worker sees his position as well as the constantly updated route provided by an algorithm on a minimap of the whole demonstration factory. Navigation is realized through a series of green dots augmented over the designated path and, when the worker goes astray, though animated arrows.  In addition to receiving tasks from ARIMS, the worker can also choose own targets with the help of an intuitive drop-down menu.

Even people unfamiliar with the demonstration factory can now navigate efficiently to all assets with the help of the route guidance application. Via augmented reality, objects can be blocked out or highlighted along the path to provide further guidance. No-go areas for the worker can be defined and communicated upon entering them.

Apart from the 3D scan, no additional investment in hardware is needed, the app is multilingual and suitable for all qualification levels due to its intuitive graphical user interface.

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