Using Augmented Reality for Collaborative Concurrent Engineering

At German Aerospace Center (DLR) new spacecrafts are designed by engineers within a special room, called Concurrent Engineering Facility (CEF). Here, the design of the first structural configuration of a spacecraft is an essential task, which is usually done in a non-collaborative manner using a Computer Aided Design (CAD) program guided by one of the engineers. First attempts tried to use virtual reality to shift the design process to a more cooperative approach. Nevertheless, these approaches lacked on intuitiveness and immersiveness. In this paper, we apply augmented reality (AR) technology to overcome those deficiencies. We present a new AR based approach to support concurrent engineering processes and investigate the acceptance of interactive collaboration for a spacecraft design scenario. We connect multiple AR head mounted displays over a network to enable real-time collaboration in a shared environment. Furthermore, we implement an AR application, which fetches visualization data from Virtual Satellite 4, an open source data model for early-stage spacecraft design, and allows manipulation of individual spacecraft parts through hand gestures. To evaluate our case study, we conduct a perceptual study with 11 participants à 2-3 persons in 4 groups. We measure the application’s usability, potential usefulness and ability to resolve interdisciplinary conflicts between requirements, such as difficulties of mutual understanding. Our results show that the application is user-friendly and has a supportive user interface. Furthermore, the collaboration and a natural communication was rated as good. In general, the potential usefulness and acceptance in CEF for such technology is given. However, its relevance for solving interdisciplinary conflicts during the spacecraft configuration process is controversial and requires further research, which is discussed in detail.