Industrial Use-Case : AR for Manual Assembly in Industry

Augmented Reality (AR), part of Industry 4.0 concepts, is an emerging technology with a great potential in assisting humans in a wide range of industrial processes. Among various use-cases, AR has started to be used as a training tool in manual assembly, by enabling workers to access contextualized digital information overlaid in the physical world. However, very few AR solutions have been adopted so far in industrial sectors, mainly because of technical and acceptability issues, as well as the effort to create AR contents. In this paper we present an AR training system designed for and within the framework of manual assembly production. The proposed approach aims to find the right balance between usability, effectiveness, user acceptance and authoring efforts, to address significant industrial challenges and provide an AR training tool adapted to the shop floor context. We demonstrated the usability and effectiveness of the proposed AR system in multiple experiments and comparatively evaluated authoring efforts with the state-of-the-art. Overall, our proposal reported excellent usability scores and was almost unanimously preferred by the participants to the experiments. Authoring was almost twice as fast as the state-of-the-art while the error rate during training was zero, validating therefore the effectiveness of the system.