ARBoard: Augmented Reality for PCB Operations in Industry 5.0

Industry 5.0 represents the next evolution in manufacturing, emphasizing human-centric approaches while lever-aging advanced technologies to create sustainable, resilient, and personalized production systems. Recent advancements in the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality are starting to have significant effects in the manufacturing lifecycle thanks to the increase in the efficiency and productivity through automation and optimization while maintaining human expertise at the center of operations. Focusing on the electronic manufacturing world, these per-vasive new technologies continue to improve, and together with automation play a fundamental role in today's industrial pro-duction. Nevertheless, manual activities remain essential in the development lifecycle of electronic products and of their PCBs. Manual labor is necessary especially during the prototyping phase to debug the design and validate its correct behavior. For this purpose, test engineers have to constantly switch between PCB schematic and layout files in a process that is slow, error-prone and stressful. The inefficiency of this process leads to a bigger time-to-market and a cost increase as well as potentially impacting the final quality of the products. This paper presents ARBoard, an innovative smart glasses-ready Augmented Reality (AR) application to bring manual PCB operations to the Industry 5.0 era. In AR, the user visualizes useful information about the board under test such as datasheet, schematic and markers projected on the physical board. The markers are placed by the user that directly points at the schematics and chooses the components that they want to locate on the board. This feature eliminates the need for cross-referencing between multiple documents and the successive localization of the components on the physical board. The functionalities of the app are expanded by a local and private AI assistant. Users can ask questions about the board, and the AI assistant will answer taking information from the board's datasheet. The AI assistant also automatically highlights the relevant component as it answers to the user.