My name is Oscar Danielsson and I'm a PhD student within IPSI. The current title of my research is: AR-Based Interface For Operators Collaborating With Robots For Industrial Assembling.
The research investigates how instructions to operators can be designed more effectively with new technologies by contextualizing information to the tasks. I started my research in the middle of 2015 and plan on being finished in the middle of 2020. This work is partly funded by Volvo Cars and is conducted in close cooperation with them.
Customers demand greater product variation and new products more often than ever before but with the same expectation of quality. This puts a demand on the manufacturing industry and, in turn, their assembly workers to be able to handle more simultaneous product variations and to learn new products more often.
Robots are not yet as flexible as humans so humans are still needed in manufacturing. But humans will work more and more with robots. Such a dynamic work greatly increases the cognitive load on assembly workers which increases error-risks and resources needed for training. If assembly-instructions can be presented online and in the right context and format this can possibly reduce the resources needed for assembly-training and reduce the error-risks. If an assembly instruction is presented on a 2D piece of paper the worker needs to interpret this into 3D and spatially connect this to the artefact to be assembled. If instead the information is presented as a 3D overlay on the artefact the workers don't need to decode as much information by themselves.
The overall aim of this research is to investigate how instructions should be designed to be correctly interpreted by assembly workers. Current instructions are mostly designed to help the assembly workers to interpret text and 2D-schematics into a physical 3D-environment. But if this interpretation isn't needed the way instructions are designed should reflect this. This research will iteratively test different forms of instruction-design in a robot-collaboration-based assembly environment to find and evaluate the effectiveness of general instruction-designs.