Remote damage inspection with AR custom headset

Nowadays key factors in high technology industries are digitalization, networking, data management, informatization and automation. The mutual interactions between these factors led toward the quickly evolving industrial revolution called “Industry 4.0” (or IR4) defined as the integration of new technologies within the design, manufacturing, and maintenance processes. This dynamic scenario is made possible by the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). In this context the inspection sector is rapidly upgrading in order to cope with the new technology paradigm of industry. The application of new technologies in NDE can improve the effectiveness, in terms of time and costs, of many inspection processes and include much more data and details exploiting multiple devices and sensing systems (NDE 4.0). In this work a remote damage inspection device is introduced, based on a stereo-laser depth map system connected to a custom headset. A laser speckle pattern is projected on the inspected component and acquired through a stereo cameras system. Damage is detected as a change in the depth map. The detected damage is then superimposed on the structure and streamed to the headset. The proposed idea would be extremely beneficial during the inspection process of large structures to assess whether a damage is present. This, in turn, would make