Abstract
Augmented reality (AR) has a number of applications in industry, but remote assistance represents one of the most prominent and widely studied use cases. Notwithstanding, although the set of functionalities supporting the communication between remote experts and on-site operators grew over time, the way in which remote assistance is delivered has not evolved yet to unleash the full potential of AR technology. The expert typically guides the operator step-by-step, and basically uses AR-based hints to visually support voice instructions. With this approach, skilled human resources may go under-utilized, as the time an expert invests in the assistance corresponds to the time needed by the operator to execute the requested operations. The goal of this work is to introduce a new approach to remote assistance that takes advantage of AR functionalities separately proposed in academic works and commercial products to re-organize the guidance workflow, with the aim to increase the operator’s autonomy and, thus, optimize the use of expert’s time. An AR-powered remote assistance platform able to support the devised approach is also presented. By means of a user study, this approach was compared to traditional step-by-step guidance, with the aim to estimate what is the potential of AR that is still unexploited. Results showed that with the new approach it is possible to reduce the time investment for the expert, allowing the operator to autonomously complete the assigned tasks in a time comparable to step-by-step guidance with a negligible need for further support.
Highlights
Digital technologies are transforming more and more the world economy and the global industry
This paper proposed an approach to reduce the time invested by a remote expert while providing support to on-field operators through Augmented reality (AR)-powered remote assistance tools in the industrial field
To evaluate the possible advantages brought by the adoption of this approach, which in the paper has been referred to as partially assisted (PA), a comparison with a fully assisted (FA) approach in which the expert provides continuous, step-by-step support from beginning to end was performed by means of a user study that considered three different industrial tasks
Summary
Digital technologies are transforming more and more the world economy and the global industry. Technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are playing a big part in this ongoing industrial revolution. As reported in [44], most of the industrial AR applications take advantage of visual cues to show the user how to execute a given task, e.g., in a maintenance or learning scenario. In principle, this approach can be used to replace or supplement paper-based instructions and manuals [9]. AR applications cannot completely substitute skills and know-how of experienced employees
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