Augmented Reality Based Machine Monitoring for Legacy Machines: a retrofitting use case

Monitoring a machine and the insight it provides for appropriate maintenance is of prime importance for the modern industry. While this is fully supported in Industry 4.0, many manufacturing units today are unable to use its technologies. One of the major reasons behind that is the lack of onboard sensors to capture and communicate appropriate data from a legacy machine. Retrofitting is considered an efficient solution to include legacy machines in an industry 4.0 ecosystem by adding external sensing and connectivity. As a proof of concept, in this paper we consider an induction motor for retrofitting, a major component of any manufacturing unit. We further show how retrofitting can help in making legacy machines compliant to the new technologies from Industry 4.0. Finally, visualization of the collected data is performed over a web based Augmented Reality application. The choice for a web-based Augmented Reality application was made to enable monitoring of the sensor data over a multitude of devices.