Industry News
Tesla Exploring AR Glasses In Manufacturing With New Patent
A recent patent titled “Augmented Reality Application for Manufacturing” by Tesla, the American automotive and energy company, was published recently.
In the description of the patent, Tesla noted that existing automotive manufacturing techniques are both time consuming and require significant manual calibration and inspection. The positioning and programming of robots for constructing and assembling automotive parts, the marking and placement of mechanical joints, the quality inspection of assembled parts, etc. require a worker specifically trained to perform tasks that include setup, configuration, calibration, and/or inspecting the quality of the work and results. The time required to perform the steps is extensive and increases the time and cost to build a new vehicle. For example, a current practice for marking joints and/or inspecting dimensional accuracy of the joints involves overlaying paper or plastic molds over a sheet metal object in order to mark the part. Similarly, joints may be inspected by manually referencing adjacent features, molds, or using coordinate measuring machine (CMM) inspection. Therefore, according to the company, there exists a need for a process and tools for increasing the efficiency and decreasing the cost of automotive manufacturing tasks. Applying computer vision and augmented reality tools to the manufacturing process can significantly increase the speed and efficiency related to manufacturing and in particular to the manufacturing of automobile parts and vehicles.
Tesla’s patent uses AR applications and computer vision to “identify an object of interest and the relationship between a user and the object”. The AR device, such as a smartphone that includes a camera and sensors or a pair of AR smart glasses, captures a live view of an object, determines the location of the device, as well as the type of the object of interest. By using this system, workers will be able to view instant data about the components they are working on.
The patent can be accessed at: http://appft.uspto.gov
