Debugging errors during real-world testing of remote platforms can be time consuming and expensive
when the remote environment is inaccessible and hazardous such as deep-sea. Pre-real world testing
facilities, such as Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL), are often not available due to the time and expense
necessary to create them. Testing facilities tend to be monolithic in structure and thus inflexible
making complete redesign necessary for slightly different uses. Redesign is simpler in the short term
than creating the required architecture for a generic facility. This leads to expensive facilities, due
to reinvention of the wheel, or worse, no testing facilities. Without adequate pre-real world testing,
integration errors can go undetected until real world testing where they are more costly to diagnose
and rectify, e.g. especially when developing Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs).
This thesis introduces a novel framework, the Augmented Reality Framework (ARF), for rapid
construction of virtual environments for Augmented Reality tasks such as Pure Simulation, HIL,
Hybrid Simulation and real world testing. ARF’s architecture is based on JavaBeans and is therefore
inherently generic, flexible and extendable. The aim is to increase the performance of constructing,
reconfiguring and extending virtual environments, and consequently enable more mature and stable
systems to be developed in less time due to previously undetectable faults being diagnosed earlier in
the pre-real-world testing phase. This is only achievable if test harnesses can be created quickly and
easily, which in turn allows the developer to visualise more system feedback making faults easier to
spot. Early fault detection and less wasted real world testing leads to a more mature, stable and
less expensive system.
ARF provides guidance on how to connect and configure user made components, allowing for
rapid prototyping and complex virtual environments to be created quickly and easily. In essence,
ARF tries to provide intuitive construction guidance which is similar in nature to LEGOR
pieces
which can be so easily connected to form useful configurations.
ARF is demonstrated through case studies which show the flexibility and applicability of ARF to
testing techniques such as HIL for UUVs. In addition, an informal study was carried out to asses the
performance increases attributable to ARF’s core concepts. In comparison to classical programming
methods ARF’s average performance increase was close to 200%. The study showed that ARF was
incredibly intuitive since the test subjects were novices in ARF but experts in programming. ARF
provides key contributions in the field of HIL testing of remote systems by providing more accessible
facilities that allow new or modified testing scenarios to be created where it might not have been
feasible to do so before. In turn this leads to early detection of faults which in some cases would not
have ever been detected before
