A Systematic Review of Augmented Reality Interfaces for Collaborative Industrial Robots

Industry 4.0 is moving factories towards a high level of collaboration between human workers and industrial robots, with the aim of improving efficiency and productivity. Among other technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the most researched in recent years to provide novel user interfaces that could easily blend the real world with additional information. This literature review aims at identifying the main strengths and weaknesses of AR with industrial robots in human-robot collaborative scenarios. The term industrial robot is meant according to the ISO 8373:2012 definition. To this end, starting from 3734 initial works, 63 papers have been selected and analysed. The results suggest that AR technology shows its effectiveness also in this particular domain. With respect to traditional approaches, AR systems are faster and more appreciated by users. Nonetheless, the use of AR in human-robot collaborative scenarios is so cutting edge that not all the considered works have properly evaluated the proposed user interfaces. Future research should improve the qualitative evaluation in order to clearly point out both limitations and strengths of the proposed systems, involving also expert users in tests.