Augmented/virtual reality can help extend the life of infrastructure

Engineers at the University of Waterloo are turning to augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) to better understand and preserve the reality of Canada’s critical infrastructure. Their research has been published in a journal Automation in Construction.

On-site inspectors are often limited in what they can see when inspecting bridges, roads, towers, pipelines and other structures because they cannot see or detect all potential problems within large structures. .

To help solve this problem, Waterloo professor Dr. Chul Min Yeum and his colleagues have created an advanced system called Smart Infrastructure Metaverse that uses AR/VR to allow on-site and off-site inspectors to interact with each other as they progress. view both the real structure, and the 3D replica model at the same time.

Not only does their system produce faster, broader, and more complete results than traditional visual inspections of the site, but it also provides a greater sense of problems within the entire building.

Their new job meets an urgent need. Most of Canada’s most important buildings were built in the mid-20th century and are now near or past their useful life, a situation that poses serious public safety risks. However, replacing these buildings would cost $264.7 billion, according to Canada’s Core Public Infrastructure Survey. Yeum’s solution combines several advanced technologies to quickly solve problems and extend the life expectancy of infrastructure.

“Smart Infrastructure Metaverse is about making it easy for on-site and off-site auditors to work together on infrastructure audits,” Yeum said. “We use AR/VR headsets to give them a shared view so they can see exactly where they are and what they’re looking at during the test, no matter where they are.”

The research team included Yeum and Dr. Zaid Abbas Al-Sabbag, both in Waterloo’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, along with Dr. Sriram Narasimhan, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California Los Angeles.

In a landmark experiment focusing on a railway bridge in Kitchener, Ontario, Yeum and his colleagues created a three-dimensional model of the structure using 3D scanners and a panoramic camera. This model allowed accurate tracking of the location and head position of on-site and off-site inspectors on a 3D map.

Next, a freelance engineer wearing a VR headset examined a 3D model of the bridge in a way that a person could run a VR game. While this was happening, on-site inspectors wearing AR headsets could see the actual bridge, the VR user, and additional information within the digital map.

Because everyone in this audit was connected to a digital map, the off-site auditor saw the exact locations of users on the site as well as the locations of the structure they were inspecting. That meant that a remote auditor could verify that the data collected was correct. To support the human inspectors, the research team used artificial intelligence to analyze the images sent from the AR headsets of the site inspectors to identify and pass any structural damage.