Fabian Doil

Augmented reality for manufacturing planning

The shortening of development cycles demand for efficient methods and tools for the planning of complex production systems. Recently immersive Virtual Reality technologies have been introduced to the manufacturing planning functions. This has lead to a decrease in planning times as well as to the improvement of the quality of planning results. The introduction of various virtual planning tools is targeting the complete integration of all planning tasks and demands an intuitive interaction with complex computer models of machinery, factory-layouts etc. Known methods and tools are limited to a purely virtual representation of planning objects and thus require the complete modeling of the production system. The high costs reduce the possible benefits of these tools and this technology in general. New potential for the improvement of the industrial planning process are offered by the AR-technology. Using AR-techniques an physically existing production environment can be superimposed with virtual planning objects. Planning tasks can thus be validated without modeling the surrounding environment of the production site. In this contribution we discuss the support of manufacturing planning tasks with the Augmented Reality technology. We present potential benefits and describe the development of an prototypical AR-System for the support of planning tasks.

Augmented Reality-based factory planning - an application tailored to industrial needs

Over the past years, a variety of augmented reality (AR)-based applications were created, to support industrial processes. Although these first demonstrator applications or prototypes cover all parts of the industrial product process (design, planning and production, service and maintenance), only a few of them actually turned into established and applied solutions. In the automotive industry, one successful field for AR-based applications is factory design and planning, metaio and Volkswagen Group Research have concerted their research work to continuously enhance a first prototype in order to create a serviceable and accepted software tool, which is tailored to the needs of AR-based factory planning processes. This paper presents the developing process of this application, the requirements analysis and the realization as a complete system. A concrete example in industry describes the usage of the system for factory planning and an outlook on future work in this area closes the document.

Mobile Augmented Reality in industrial applications: Approaches for solution of user-related issues

Augmented Reality (AR) uses computer-generated virtual information to enhance the userpsilas information access. While numerous previous studies have demonstrated the large potential of AR to improve industrial processes by enhancing product quality and reducing production times it is still unclear if and how long term usage of such AR technology produces stress and strain. This paper presents an approach to use the analysis of Heart Rate Variability to objectively measure current user strain during different work tasks. Results of a user study comparing strain during an AR supported and a non-AR supported work task in a laboratory setting are presented and discussed.

Pick-by-Vision: A first stress test

In this paper we report on our ongoing studies around the application of Augmented Reality methods to support the order picking process of logistics applications. Order picking is the gathering of goods out of a prepared range of items following some customer orders. We named the visual support of this order picking process using Head-mounted Displays “Pick-by-Vision”. This work presents the case study of bringing our previously developed Pickby-Vision system from the lab to an experimental factory hall to evaluate it under more realistic conditions. This includes the execution of two user studies. In the first one we compared our Pickby-Vision system with and without tracking to picking using a paper list to check picking performance and quality in general. In a second test we had subjects using the Pick-by-Vision system continuously for two hours to gain in-depth insight into the longer use of our system, checking user strain besides the general performance. Furthermore, we report on the general obstacles of trying to use HMD-based AR in an industrial setup and discuss our observations of user behaviour.

Perceptual issues in optical-see-through displays

Optical see-through devices enable observers to see additional information embedded in real environments. There is already some evidence of increasing visual load in respective systems. We investigated visual performance when users performed visual search tasks or dual tasks only on the optical see-through device, only on a computer screen, or switching between both. In spite of having controlled for basic differences between both devices, switching between the presentation devices produced costs in visual performance. The assumption that these decreases in performance are partly due to differences localizing the presented objects was confirmed by convergence data.

Extended investigations of user-related issues in mobile industrial AR

The potential of Augmented Reality (AR) to support industrial processes has been demonstrated in several studies. While there have been first investigations on user related issues in the long-duration use of mobile AR systems, to date the impact of theses systems on physiological and psychological aspects is not explored extensively. We conducted an extended study in which 19 participants worked 4 hours continuously in an order picking process with and without AR support. Results of the study comparing strain and work efficiency are presented and open issues are discussed.