An Application of Augmented Reality to Electrical Power Equipment Maintenance

With the development of science and technology in the power industry, the maintenance staffs of all power companies are facing more and more electrical power equipment. The internal structure of equipment is more complex. So are the external physical and logical relations of it. The traditional maintenance management system usually offers ways such as object tree, keyword search and chart zooming to find an item of equipment or a service node; and offer ways of the traditional spreadsheets and two dimension graphics to show the data. When dealing with complex business logic, the system often needs to use a lot of layered two dimension graphics. And users are difficult to get the key information at first. Users need to spend a lot of energy to remember and understand the relationship between the graphics, prone to miscarriage of justice. To overcome these difficulties, we developed an augmented reality-based power equipment maintenance system. A head-mounted display is used to observe and choose the specific power equipment. Needed data from information system are superimposed on the video image of the equipment. The business of the equipment is handled by data glove, the control key, gesture, voice, eye tracking, analog touch etc. The field experiments showed that our system could greatly reduce the workload of the maintenance staffs and improve work efficiency.