Augmented industrial maintenance (AIM): A case study for evaluating and comparing with paper and video media supports

Abstract

Maintenance is a crucial point to improve productivity in industry whereas systems to be maintained have an increasing complexity. Augmented Reality (AR) can reduce maintenance process time and improve quality by giving virtual information and assistance to the operator during the procedure. In this paper, a workflow is firstly presented allowing a maintenance expert to author augmented reality maintenance procedures without computer skills. Then the AR maintenance application developed is described. Based on it, we present a case study which aims to compare maintenance efficiency with respect to the market available media support used, i.e. paper, video, AR tablet or AR Smart Glasses. A set of experiments involving 24 persons is described and analyzed. The results show that augmented reality maintenance reduce number of errors done by operator than with paper for the same duration of maintenance. A qualitative analysis shows that AR systems are well accepted by the users.