Assessing the Effectiveness of Augmented Reality Handheld Interfaces for Robot Path Programming

The Industry 4.0 is changing the very nature of the factories. If, in the past, the industrial facilities were composed by a plethora of devices disconnected from each other, nowadays, the digitalization of the industrial processes allows the devices to continuously exchange data with each other, thus improving the levels of production. Autonomous robots represent one of the main Industry 4.0 pillars. Among them, the collaborative robots are expected to be extensively used on the production lines allowing the companies to face an increasingly competitive market. In order to not be cut off from the production process, the human operators should combine their intrinsic capabilities of adapting to unforeseen scenarios with the high level of accuracy, speed and strength of the robots. Augmented Reality (AR) is another main pillar and it results to be effective for programming the robotic arms. Several AR interfaces have been evaluated in such scenarios in the last decade. However, there is a lack of studies that have deeply analyzed the effectiveness of AR handheld interfaces to control arm robot for tasks that require the creation of robot path in the 3D space. The study presented in this work fits in this context, proposing an evaluation of an AR handheld interface to control a robotic manipulator. The main results suggest that these types of interfaces are slightly adequate for controlling the manipulators, indicating that there is still room for improvements and research.