AR for Maintenance: A Review of Augmented Reality Tools and Platforms for Training and Maintenance Procedures

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) is a widely accepted technology that can be exploited to provide mass-market users an effective and customizable support in a large spectrum of personal applications, by superimposing computer-generated hints to the real world. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are playing a key role in the exponential growth of this kind of solutions. Maintenance, repair, and assembly have been considered as strategic fields for the application of the AR technology from the 1990s, but often only specialists using ad hoc hardware were involved in limited experimental tests. Nowadays, AR-based maintenance and repair procedures are available also for end-users on consumer electronics devices. This paper aims to explore use of this technology in maintenance and manufacturing industry, new trends in utilizing the technology, by also presenting the software framework to provide AR based maintenance solution