Automation has yielded significant savings in the processes of ship design and engineering, and fabrication and manufacturing. However, there remains one area of the shipbuilding life cycle that has seen very little benefit from automation: the processes of installation and outfitting. The installation/outfitting phase of ship construction even today relies on the skill of a human mechanic. Installation work is non-repetitive and typically involves human judgment. Of the substantial number of installation/outfitting person-hours expended per ship about 10 to 15% of that time is spent in the process of locating: putting a component in its correct location within the ship. In shipbuilding, as with Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC), location on the ship means location with respect to a global (or ship’s) coordinate system. This requirement drives the location cost because conforming locations are to the virtual ship’s coordinate system. Thus, locations are based on milestones of the ship coordinate system, which may be remote from the location of the component to be installed. Setting up such reference locations is a time-consuming operation. This paper describes an application of Augmented Reality (AR), the ARmetage system, that is designed to streamline the installation/outfitting process.
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