A Germany-based engineering and electronics company, the Robert Bosch GmbH group, announced its North American division will partner with Carnegie Mellon University to further explore the use of spatial computing in manufacturing environments.
The collaboration, itself a $3 million endeavor, will aim to see how augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) can be used together via the overlay of virtual content that is seen by computers on top of the physical world that is seen by humans.
CMU electrical and computer engineering professor Anthony Rowe will join Bosch as part of the international Bosch Research team that is conducting the investigations, and he will serve as chief scientist for the team. Rowe has been a key player for the Carnegie Mellon Augmented Reality Edge Networking Architecture platform, which strives to make mixed-reality digital twin systems easy to program.
“While the vision for spatial computing is promising, the reality is that these complex applications are difficult to create and remain largely decoupled from the physical world,” Rowe said in a statement.
Part of these efforts will involve changing the current view of how these technologies are used today as part of a larger plan that could someday see them used in a wide array of applications. For example, the team is interested in finding out how an XR-instrumented factory of the future could incorporate its workers, machines and manufactured elements with a digital counterpart.
“A broad range of new infrastructure and tools are needed to reach the level of robustness required to truly shift VR, AR and XR from advertising and entertainment to standard practice in the industrial domain,” Christopher Martin, director of the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Pittsburgh, said in a statement.
Eventually, the team of researchers hope to demonstrate how these XR applications can work in an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) context, with an emphasis being placed around safety, reliability and real-time performance metrics.
