Development and Evaluation of a Mixed Reality Assistance System in the Context of Manual Assembly

Manufacturing environments face the challenge of ever-increasing complexity in their products due to the continuously increasing degree of individuality. Together with the demand for meeting high quality standards, this leads to the requirement to assist workers during a manufacturing process. Cognitive assistance systems which provide work-related information during their work tasks have been proven to be a successful aid for these challenges. Whenever a new emerging technology is applied for worker assistance, the technology should be tested to evaluate its positive or negative impact in a specified assembly process. This work aims to test the impact of an emerging technology, the Microsoft HoloLens 2 Head Mounted Display (HMD), in a manufacturing environment. Therefore, a prototypical Mixed Reality (MR) application is introduced which provides assembly-related information to support the worker during the work process and to ensure a zero failure culture. To evaluate the impact of the presented application a comparative study is conducted, comparing existing text-based instructions on touchscreens to the newly-integrated interactive 3D assembly instructions. Although an efficiency can not be shown in the presented study, a significant increase in quality of the assembled product was gained, leading the way into a zero failure culture.