The Augmented Welder Profile: Augmenting Craftmanship with Digital and Collaborative Tools

Abstract: More and more applications of Augmented Reality (AR) in manufacturing industries are introduced every day and while recent research has shown that one of the more popular applications, high volume assembly instructions, might not offer the best setting for this technology, many other applications exist that do. For assembly, remote guidance or training, rare assemblies, low takt time and high mix production, do still show promise. This article introduces the role of the Augmented Welder, a role utilizing AR technology for the programming of a welding robot. An operator support system in the form of a custom application programmed in Unity and visualized with a pair of Hololens2, connected to an ABB robot through RobotStudio. The robot is equipped with a welding gun dummy. The operator can, through the Hololens2, set safety boundaries, introduce work pieces, place targets in a 3D space, simulate the robot path, send the program to the robot, and activate the physical robot, among other things. We performed a modified pluralistic walkthrough to evaluate the operator support system both with respect to our application but also to search valuable insight to the general use of AR in the use of such applications. Results showed that while the subjects were generally positive towards the support system, several issues were identified and raised by various degrees of severity. The primary issues arose around the navigation and interaction with 2D menus and 3D objects in a 3D Mixed Reality (MR) space. The absence of physics confused the subjects as they could not interact with the virtual objects as they would have with physical objects. The lack of physics simply meant that they didn't act the same. Furthermore the interaction with 2D menus in a 3D space was both reported and observed as being very difficult as the 2D representations probably led to problems with depth perception. The general results of the debriefing indicated that using AR for robot programming was challenging although some of this can be attributed to the fact that this was the participants first use of such a system. The users indicated that the menus were appropriate and that the interaction was intuitive while the navigation within the system was not experienced as natural which confirms the above-mentioned issues with menus disappearing from the line of sight and feedback around generated target points being absent.

Keywords: AR, MR, Operator 4.0, welding, augmented welder, user experience, evaluation, inspection method

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004436

Cite this paper:

​