Virtual/Augmented Reality for infrastructure management of road networks

• Autor(a) principal: Joel Márcio Torres Carneiro
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/115332
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

The management and maintenance of road infrastructures, which include pavements, vertical and horizontal signage, traffic lights, access for people with physical disabilities, among others, require the use of a vast amount of information about their maintenance history and current situation. This information is mainly geo-referenced and maintained in geographic information systems to facilitate the access to it. However, nowadays the majority of the information still is stored on paper which makes difficult the access. Furthermore, this is not only applicable to the road infrastructures but also to all the infrastructures of our cities. Indeed, it is necessary to make smarter the management and maintenance of infrastructures so that it is not only easier to access the data, but also to predict changes in due time. Thus, it is necessary to continuously monitor the conditions of the infrastructure, that is, monitor the indicators of degradation status, identification of faults or possible defects in infrastructure, among others. Tools are also needed to enable the addition of information when repair and maintenance work is performed, representing an important instrument for data collection.This project studies the potential technical applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) as a support to the management and maintenance of the road infrastructures. The developed applications use mobile platforms with video cameras for introducing and manipulate virtual objects while the real environment and its infrastructures are visualized. Thereby, the apps identify and present information about the infrastructures in the scene.Several studies have been done to better integrate the Geographic Information System (GIS) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) technologies. Unfortunately, there is no standard ontology or some kind of method capable of doing it without the loss of important data. Thereby, it is proposed a new approach for integrating BIM and GIS, also using the IoT and VR/AR technologies leading to a smarter monitoring and a better visualisation. As concept proof, two apps were developed. One allows for the introduction of virtual signals in a place without signage to a better evaluation of the future signal's positioning. The other application displays the information about an infrastructure when the user aims its mobile device's camera to it. The app uses a server, based on GIS and BIM data. Therefore, the data model has an association with the BIM technology, which describes all stages of the infrastructure's development and maintenance. Moreover, the system can be integrated with the IoT technology, which focuses on enabling communication between all objects either real or virtual. The two applications were evaluated taking into account the AR 's definition, where the system must mix the virtual and real worlds, be interactive in real-time, and the real and virtual objects must be aligned in 3D. Furthermore, it was evaluated if the displayed information about the infrastructure is correct and if it effectively belongs to the infrastructure in the scene, and the distance associated errors.