Nowadays, the global market requires shorter life cycles and variety of products to satisfy customer's demands. Many manufacturing companies need to design and implement manufacturing systems rapidly to enhance global competitiveness. For these reasons, VR (Virtual Reality) technology has been used principally for system design and process development of many companies in the manufacturing industry over the last few years. However, VR based digital manufacturing methods and software require perfect 3D models of whole manufacturing system in the virtual environment to implement and simulate target systems. This means that modelling tasks for new system configuration increase useless expenses and efforts. AR (Augmented Reality) technology as a new man-machine interface has been introduced by not only computer science companies but also some manufacturing companies. AR technology superimposes required virtual objects on the real-time image of the physical manufacturing environment. Therefore, the modelling time and cost for new manufacturing system can be dramatically reduced by using AR technology. In this paper, the architecture of the developed AR software for the manufacturing system is introduced. Moreover, the methods such as a multi-marker coordinate system, a threshold image, a clipping plane for virtual objects, and so on, are proposed to generate the operation program for the manufacturing system. Base on these methods, the test bed of the automobile spare tire inserting system is configured as a 5X-reduced scale and the operation program for spare tire inserting is generated.
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