Design and implementation of an Industrial Augmented Reality HoloLens 2 application to speed-up the completion of human tasks

In the time of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the digital transformation of firms in terms of people, processes, services, and systems to increase competitiveness is an everyday activity. Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) emerge as disruptive technologies, particularly in the Industrial Augmented Reality (IAR) research area, which aims to improve industrial processes while maximizing worker efficiency and mobility by providing virtual elements in real-world scenarios. The majority of IAR applications focus on manual assembly processes by providing work instructions to the workers, and electronics/automation is one of the most interesting industry application areas. IAR enables uninterrupted work by delivering the appropriate information in the ideal format in meaningful time and space, allowing workers to keep their hands free and significantly reducing task completion times and error rates. This makes IAR particularly useful in the Lean Manufacturing (LM) process, which aims to eliminate waste from an organization. In this context, an augmented reality platform called AnnHoloTator for Microsoft Hololens 2 was developed to solve a bottleneck in the electrical panel assembly (EBA) process of a company that produces industrial electrical systems. AnnHoloTator allows for the real-time visualization of digital documents and enables to add annotations on the virtual documents, which can be immediately shared with other workers, improving the efficiency and accuracy of the EBA process. The system provides a data-flexible approach, with all documents stored on a remote server and major computations done there as well. This allows on-site professionals to make annotations directly on the virtual document at any moment, which is then shared with all other workers who have access. AnnHoloTator differs from existing systems because it provides a way to explore and modify the content of digital documents by interacting with their 3D counterparts.