AR digital twins for interactive warehouse navigation
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Date
2025-09-18
Authors
Χρυσικόπουλος, Θεόφιλος
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Abstract
Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly being adopted in industrial and logistics settings for its ability to enhance real-world environments with interactive digital content. This thesis presents the development of an AR application for the Meta Quest 3,-built in Unity, that demonstrates a functional prototype for warehouse visualization-and robot simulation. The core objective was to register a digital twin of a warehouse—captured as a point cloud via LiDAR—and enable a virtual storage robot to-autonomously navigate this environment while responding to spatial constraints.
Registration is achieved through Meta’s Scene Understanding API by detecting predefined reference objects in the user’s environment. Once aligned, the warehouse-digital twin is rendered using custom GPU shaders optimized for the Quest 3’s mobile hardware. The rendering system allows users to adjust point size and transparency in real time, balancing visual clarity with environmental awareness. A Unity-NavMesh-based agent drives the robot’s motion, allowing it to autonomously move-through the scene while avoiding virtual colliders that correspond to real-world obstacles.
To enhance realism, the application incorporates occlusion and shadow casting using the Depth API and shaders of ARFoundation. Virtual objects visually blend into-the physical space, improving immersion and spatial coherence. Wrist-mounted interfaces and controller-based interaction enable users to configure the environment,-place virtual objects, and define navigation constraints.
This project demonstrates the feasibility of combining digital twins with real-time-AR interaction and agents with autonomous behavior in a mobile headset context. It-lays the groundwork for future AR applications in logistics, simulation, and spatial-computing environments.
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Keywords
Augmented reality, Digital twins, Registration, Geometry shader, Compute shader, Occlusion, Virtual shadows