Evaluation of augmented reality in industrial environments

Abstract

Consulta en la Biblioteca ETSI Industriales (9150)

[EN] Nowadays, everything that societies uses, such as automobiles, computers,and other types of consumer products is the result of manufacturing activities. The product and innovation life cycle are becoming starter ,and the improvement of processes and products require more flexibility and productivity.Therefore new technologies and methodologies that support all activities related to the implementation of the product are needed. With the rapidly increasing number and types of manufactured products, new manufacturing trends such as Lean Manufacturing, and Just in Time should be developed. Nevertheless, the increased product diversity and consumer demand had led to many issues where current manufacturing practices are becoming more difficult to utilize .As these trends continues, new manufacturing technologies will be needed in the future. The use of computational tools increasing since decades .A direct important field where Augmented Reality(AR) can be useful is in manufacturing and maintenance tasks, it provide an intuitive means to interact with information. AR technology can be used to implement the user assistance, which consist in giving all information necessary to carry out efficiently maintenance and manufacturing tasks. The information is provided by means of an optical see through Head-Mounted Display (HMD).The basic idea of AR is to bring additional information directly into the view of a users. Maintenance and manufacturing tasks require that operators alternate their attention between the assembly instructions and the part that should be assembled. This constant change of attention consumes value time, especially when the instructions are not conveniently placed relative to the operator. With AR technology the operator can concentrate on the task without having to change head or body position to receive the nest set of instructions. The ability to visualize and interact with an environment that has been augmented with virtual data could provide solutions to the manufacturing and maintenance tasks in the future.