Augmented Reality

On the step to the 4th industrial revolution, production systems are changing in a consequence of technological further developments. The technological development goes along with new concepts for the design of work places and organizational processes. The paper at hand focusses on the resulting changes for employees, the design of working environments and the need for new qualification measures. The paper shows that learning and working will be more and more integrated. This will lead to systems that will be applied directly on the shop floor.

The methods presented allow the splitting of classic monolithic numerical controls of industrial robots and machine tools into their functional units. The core functionalities can then be brought onto different computers in even separate places. Using techniques of augmented reality allows enriching a captured scene with additional information, as a virtual model of the industrial robot or the planned paths. Combining these approaches leads to a simplified programming task for industrial robots as the programs can be visualized in their context. This decreases setup time and improves quality.

To infer human intentions by approaches, which are embedded into technical systems, is the foundation of a future key technology that enables the development of novel assistive devices. These devices provide solutions to current and future challenges that are caused by the demographic change and requirements of  “Industry 4.0”. Embedded Brain Reading enables a mobile recognition of human intention embedded into a technical system to support users fault tolerantly. The model of the approach suggests that man-machine interaction is verifiable for correctness and completeness for its safe usage.

Highly valuable goods are usually customized to the specific needs of the customer. It is therefore essential to integrate the customer in the important decisions during the engineering phase. This article introduces a Augmented Reality solution to design and plan variants on-site together with the customer. This solution was tested on a real example, a retrofit of an emission reducing technology on a ship.

At present, the industry has to face various challenges due to the needs of customers for individualized products and the related increasing number of product variants. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of the value added process and the demographic change with the related increasing average age of the employees as well as the growing shortage of skilled professionals negatively influence the situation. This article deals with assistance systems as a potential tool to meet these new demands and demonstrates successful implementations of these systems that have been already realized.

The layout planning represents a prime example of the interdisciplinary nature of factory planning. A comprehensive cooperation provides opportunities to involve ideas and experiences of as many people as possible, to exploit synergies, to realize a faster coordination of the planning status between the departments and thus improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the planning process. The development of more powerful computer technology and the increasing popularity of mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablet computers) provide new potentials and possibilities for the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in the application field of factory planning. This paper describes an approach for the application of AR in participative layout planning.

tensive thought about the organization and optimization of workplaces. The level of automation in these domains provides a response of these trends. Assisting systems and their use in innovative human-robot interaction are playing a major role. Pressure-sensitive sensor systems using so-called tactile sensors like those described in this article are one example of current trends in future research.

Smartphones and tablet PCs are increasingly wowing industrial applications with their high functionality, ever greater capability and ease of use. The project “Spatial Programming of Industrial Robots” makes full use of these benefits. The robot programmer is supported through a mobile augmented reality app and gesture-based interaction for the definition of the program. In this regard, the app covers spatial visualization of the program in a real environment and program management. The robot programs can be transmitted from the mobile device via an unified interface to the robot controllers. Furthermore, there are interfaces for the exchange of robot programs with common simulation tools of the digital factory.

Customized product variants and ever shorter development cycles are defining the basic challenges in product life cycles. Moreover, enhanced product quality is connected with increasing product complexity and necessitates adapting workflow organization and integrating IT aids, which are intended to minimize process times, reduce fault potential and render complex work steps manageable. Augmented reality technology helps meeting increased requirements, particularly for manual work. Projects from the Fraunhofer IFF provide a basis to elucidate current issues in research and application.

Ongoing development of automation technologies and a foreseeable lack of specialized workforces require a better organization of work processes in production and adjacent domains. In this context, an optimized division of functions and labour between humans and robots in terms of direct human-robot cooperation will become a relevant topic. But from a security and labour protection point of view, this is critical, since the strict separation between the robot’s danger area and the employee has to be given up. The earlier and the more effective the planned process can be checked for compliance with security directives, the higher are security and quality levels as well as cost and time savings of the installation. Today’s 3D simulation environments cover industrial robotics comprehensively already: from heavyweight goods handling to arc welding and paint shop applications, diverse scenarios can be modelled and simulated. If necessary, human workers are represented by digital human ...