Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Trends of Emerging Techniques for Augmented Reality-Based Maintenance

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) is a well-known technology that can be exploited to provide mass-market users an effective and customizable support in a large spectrum of personal applications, by overlapping computer-generated hints to the real world. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are playing a key role in the exponential growth of this kind of solutions. Nonetheless, there exists some application domains that just started to take advantage from the AR systems. Maintenance, repair, and assembly have been considered as strategic fields for the application of the AR technology from the 1990s, but often only specialists using ad hoc hardware were involved in limited experimental tests. Nowadays, AR-based maintenance and repair procedures are available also for end-users on consumer electronics devices. This paper aims to explore new challenges and opportunities of this technology, by also presenting the software framework that is being developed in the EASE-R 3 project by exploiting reconfigurable AR procedures and tele-assistance to overcome some of the limitations of current solutions.

A systematic review of augmented reality applications in maintenance

“…His results show a reduction of both errors and time using AR-based instructions rather than paper-based instructions. Finally Lamberti [29], shows the capabilities of AR applying it on a notebook and printer maintenance operations even though he describes the automotive and aviation maintenance industry as the one needing for cost maintenance reductions. His research partners predicted a reduction of about 40% in travels and 30% in cost for maintenance operations.…”

Augmented reality technology in the manufacturing industry: A review of the last decade

“…Other studies review AR systems that can be used for specific purposes, such as to enhance human computer interaction (HCI) (Igarashi and Inami, 2015;Rajendran et al, 2015) or human-robot collaboration (Green et al, 2008). Several papers analyze AR applications devoted to a particular industrial task; the most investigated tasks are assembly (Stork and Schub€ o, 2010;Leu et al 2013;Wang et al, 2016a) , maintenance (Oliveira et al, 2013;Lamberti et al 2015), design (Nee et al, 2012;Yin et al, 2015), safety/ergonomics (Hovanec et al, 2014) and food logistics (Vanderroost et al, 2017).…”

A State Validation System for Augmented Reality Based Maintenance Procedures

“…In [19], a collaborative framework solution is proposed to train technicians in assembly tasks of complex systems such as aircraft engines. Another example is provided by the EASE-R 3 project [20], which aimed to develop an integrated framework for an easy and cost-effective repair, renovation and reuse of machine tools within modern factories. As part of this project, an AR framework has been developed to provide: AR aids for maintenance procedures, remote assistance from an expert technician, and re-configurability of the maintenance procedures.…”