Augmented reality in the smart factory: Supporting workers in an industry 4.0. environment

TLDR

The paper introduces an augmented reality system designed to support human workers in rapidly changing production environments and reports initial experience showing successful use by several hundred users with no prior assembly experience. The system delivers spatially registered task information directly into the user’s field of view, guiding users through unfamiliar tasks such as new product assembly and providing picking and assembly instructions within the spatial context. Initial deployment of the system has been successful, with several hundred users—none of whom had prior assembly experience—reporting effective use of the AR guidance.

Abstract

We present an augmented reality system that supports human workers in a rapidly changing production environment. By providing spatially registered information on the task directly in the user's field of view the system can guide the user through unfamiliar tasks (e.g. assembly of new products) and visualize information directly in the spatial context were it is relevant. In the first version we present the user with picking and assembly instructions in an assembly application. In this paper we present the initial experience with this system, which has already been used successfully by several hundred users who had no previous experience in the assembly task.