This work addresses the difficulty and high cost of manually authoring Augmented Reality (AR) content for workflows guiding trainees or maintenance technicians through the maintenance of a machine tool. While at the time of the writing the workflows themselves could be automatically generated from ontology data, the AR scenes depicting the workflow still had to be created manually by diligently placing virtual object within a global coordinate system (provided by tracking systems) by a technical writer.

To address this problem, I created number of concepts detailing the different connections found in machine tools and added them to the ontology from which the workflows were created. Furthermore, I developed a prototype implementation that could extract the geometry from CAD data, store that data in the ontology and, provided information of the connection instances had been added to the ontology, could automatically generate AR scenes that could lead technicians through a maintenance task.

This research was performed to fulfill the requirements for the Diplom in Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University.