6 enterprise AR use cases

The Electric Power Research Institute Inc., or EPRI, and Duke Energy are partnering on an enterprise AR use case involving storm damage assessment.

When a hurricane, tornado, earthquake or other natural disaster strikes, surveyors are sent out to assess the damage and note how much and which type of equipment is needed for repairs. With paper and pencil in hand, these surveyors are generally 50% accurate on their first pass, said Andy Lowery, co-founder and CEO at RealWear. A second pass is then required and that additional assessment cycle takes about two days. That redundancy is costly. With an average outage affecting approximately 250,000 people, every day that power is out represents a loss of around $8 million in revenue, Lowery said.

The energy partnership’s solution was to create an AR application in which surveyors, wearing a headset in situ, would access a back-end system that had “before” pictures of every single piece of the distribution system that Duke Energy maintains. Using Bluetooth beacons and triangulation, the AR device would then use AR arrows to direct a person to take an “after” picture of the damage that was perfectly aligned with the “before” picture. After the technician walks through the entire space, the device automatically generates a report with all the pictures, details what equipment need to be ordered and beams it up to the cloud.

With the AR application, Duke Energy has reduced errors to zero, making for an instantaneous one- to two-day savings of $8 to $16 million per potential outage.