Augmented reality for the manufacturing industry: the case of an assembly assistant

This paper studies the impact of augmented reality (AR) on manual assembly operations in the manufacturing industry. A review of AR-based solutions in this field shows that assembly assistants capable to support the user in key activities (identification, handling, alignment, joining, adjustment and inspection) are particularly beneficial. Since assembly activities are generally not addressed within comprehensive solutions, an AR-based tool supporting all of them is proposed, and its effectiveness in terms of completion time and error rate is compared with the use of the corresponding paper-based instructions. Results of a user study unveil that the proposed tool generally reduces the number of errors, but the time needed to complete the assembly tends to increase. Limitations of the current solution and potential directions for future work are discussed.