A Multi-Sensor Interface to Improve the Teaching and Learning Experience in Arc Welding Training Tasks

This paper presents the development of a multi-sensor extended reality platform to improve the teaching and learning experience of arc welding tasks. Traditional methods to acquire hand-eye welding coordination skills are typically conducted through one-to-one instruction where trainees/trainers must wear protective helmets and conduct several hands-on tests with metal workpieces. This approach is inefficient as the harmful light emitted from the electric arc impedes the close monitoring of the welding process (practitioners can only observe a small bright spot and most geometric information cannot be perceived). To tackle these problems, some recent training approaches have leveraged on virtual reality (VR) as a way to safely simulate the process and visualize the geometry of the workpieces. However, the synthetic nature of the virtual simulation reduces the effectiveness of the platform; It fails to comprise actual interactions with the welding environment, which may hinder the learning process of a trainee. To incorporate a real welding experience, in this work we present a new automated multi-sensor extended reality platform for arc welding training. It consists of three components: (1) An HDR camera, monitoring the real welding spot in real-time; (2) A depth sensor, capturing the 3D geometry of the scene; and (3) A head-mounted VR display, visualizing the process safely. Our innovative platform provides trainees with a "bot trainer", virtual cues of the seam geometry, automatic spot tracking, and a performance score. To validate the platform's feasibility, we conduct extensive experiments with several welding training tasks. We show that compared with the traditional training practice and recent virtual reality approaches, our automated method achieves better performances in terms of accuracy, learning curve, and effectiveness.