Large area indoor tracking for industrial augmented reality

A precise tracking with minimal setup times, minimal changes to the environment and acceptable costs, satisfying industrial demands in large factory buildings is still a challenging task for augmented reality (AR) applications. We present a system to determine the pose for monitor based AR systems in large indoor environments, e.g. 200 × 200 meters and more. An infrared laser detects retroreflective targets and computes a 2D position and orientation based on the information of a preprocessed map of the targets. Based on this information the 6D pose of a video camera attached to a servo motor, that is further mounted on a mobile cart is obtained by identifying the transformation between the laser scanner and the several adjustable views of the camera through a calibration method. The adjustable steps of the servo motor are limited to a discrete number of steps to limit the calibration effort. The positional accuracy of the system is estimated by error propagation and presented.