Augmented reality training platform for assembly and maintenance skills

Abstract

The training of technicians in the acquisition of new maintenance and assembly tasks is an important factor in industry. As the complexity of these tasks can be enormous, the training of technicians to acquire the necessary skills to perform them efficiently is a challenging point. In this context it is shown that Augmented Reality is a powerful technology to support training in the particular context of industrial service procedures, since instructions on how to perform the service tasks can be directly linked to the machine parts to be processed. Due to the increasing complexity of maintenance tasks, it is not sufficient to train the technicians execution of these tasks, but rather to train the underlying skillssensorimotor and cognitivethat are necessary for an efficient acquisition and performance of new maintenance operations. All these facts lead to the need for efficient training systems for the training of maintenance and assembly skills which accelerate the technicians learning and acquisition of new maintenance procedures. Furthermore, these systems should improve the adjustment of the training process to new training scenarios and enable the reuse of existing training material that has proven its worth. In this context a novel concept and platform for multimodal Augmented Reality-based training of maintenance and assembly skills has been developed, which includes the training of the involved sub-skills and the evaluation of the designed training system. Since procedural skills are considered as the most important skills for maintenance and assembly operations, we focus on the training of these skills, as well as appropriate methods for improving them. We developed Augmented Reality based training methods for assembly and maintenance tasks. We developed multimodal interaction technologies for mobile training systems. We evaluated the transfer of skill in comparison to traditional training methods.