Multi-person Collaborative Augmented Reality Assembly Process Evaluation System Based on HoloLens

Abstract

With the development of products in the direction of products in complexity and sophistication, assembly process planning becomes a complex and time-consuming issue in manufacturing. Augmented reality (AR), especially collaborative augmented reality, can be used to aid the design of assembly processes, help efficiently evaluate and improve the designed assembly process from multiple perspectives. This paper presents a methodology and the associated system for enhancing assembly process scheme evaluation in assembly process plan stage using collaborative augmented reality. It first describes the overall scheme of the system that based on a role-based multi-person collaboration method. Subsequently, system features like: AR collaborative environment (synchronization of multiple AR devices), AR assembly simulation (virtual model manipulation, collision detection), AR assistant evaluation tools (AR observation tool, visualize performance data, AR evaluation table) are described. Finally, this paper illustrates possible usages and potential benefits of how collaborative AR helps evaluate the assembly process and helps find the bottleneck of assembly step through a use case study.