even an experienced mechanic will tell you that you can never have too much reference material
knowing how a vehicle mechanically works is one thing, figuring out how a certain manufacturer implemented those mechanical principles is totally another
So how do these systems work? Do the goggles have some sort of position measuring devices or do they work through image recognition of what's in the field?
I've been looking into augmented reality technologies lately; vision systems are getting really good. There are some good ones here (click twice to load Flash videos, or download AVIs):
Maybe it's a rough indicator of how much looking is required to locate a part. Maybe it reduces the odds of cracking One's head on large metal objects.
With these maintenance tasks seemingly pretty well-defined in terms of movements and actions with 3D objects in a 3D space, it doesn't take much imagination to see a suitably equipped robot could be doing this kind of thing pretty soon.
What's neat about this is that it essentially takes a skill, and packages it up, and allows anyone who can turn a wrench to do the same job with extremely minimal training.
Not enough Marines in the motor pool to fix all the broken trucks? No problem, augment them with some cooks.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 44.1 ms ] threadknowing how a vehicle mechanically works is one thing, figuring out how a certain manufacturer implemented those mechanical principles is totally another
Would be delighted to be contradicted, though!
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~bob/research/research_ptamm.html
Seriously though, there seems to be some very interesting potential for this type of augmented reality.
Not enough Marines in the motor pool to fix all the broken trucks? No problem, augment them with some cooks.