Virtual Welder Trainer

Author

White, Steven ; Prachyabrued, Mores ; Baghi, Dhruva ; Aglawe, Amit ; Reiners, Dirk ; Borst, Christoph ; Chambers, Terry

Author_Institution

Univ. of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA

fYear

2009

Firstpage

303

Lastpage

303

Abstract

The goal of this project is to develop a training system that can simulate the welding process in real-time and give feedback that avoids learning wrong motion patterns for beginning welders and can be used to analyze the process by the teacher afterwards. The system is based mainly on COTS components. A standard PC with a Dual-core CPU and a medium-end nVidia graphics card is sufficient. Input is done with a regular welding gun to allow realistic training. The gun is tracked by an OptiTrack system with 3 FLEX:V100 cameras. The same is also used to track a regular welding helmet to get accurate eye positions for display, which was chosen over glasses for robustness. The display itself is a Zalman Trimon stereo monitor that is laid out horizontally. The software is designed around a main simulation component for solving heat conduction on a grid of simulation points based on local GaussSeidel elimination.

Keywords

cameras; computer based training; computer displays; computer graphic equipment; industrial training; optical tracking; production engineering computing; software packages; virtual reality; welding; welding equipment; 3 FLEX:V100 camera; COTS component; GaussSeidel elimination; OptiTrack system; Zalman Trimon stereo monitor; dual-core CPU; medium-end nVidia graphics card; standard PC; virtual welding training system; welding gun; welding helmet; welding process simulation; Analytical models; Cameras; Displays; Feedback; Glass; Graphics; Motion analysis; Pattern analysis; Real time systems; Welding;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Virtual Reality Conference, 2009. VR 2009. IEEE

ISSN

1087-8270

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-3943-0

Electronic_ISBN

1087-8270

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VR.2009.4811066

Filename

4811066