The Development of an Advanced Maintenance training programme utilizing Augmented Reality

Maintenance engineering represents an area of great opportunity to reduce cost, improve productivity, and increase profitability for manufacturing companies. There are examples of best practice that can be classed as World Class Maintenance which deliver great benefits. Unfortunately very few companies, and especially small and medium sized companies, remotely approach this level. Research has shown that savings of around 10% are achievable by improving asset management techniques through adopting modern maintenance practices, tools, and techniques. One area that is often overlooked is the development of an appropriate training programme in which the skills and knowledge are retained and used to develop the skills of young apprentices or new staff using specific technologies. Augmented Reality (AR) has been identified as a technology offering a promising approach to training which combines a number of disciplines including engineering, computing, and psychology. Augmented Reality (AR) enables users to view, through the use of see-through displays, virtual objects superimposed dynamically, and merged seamlessly, with real world objects in a real environment via a range of devices such as Ipad or Tablet, so that the virtual objects and real world images appear to exist at the same time in the same place providing real-time interaction. Therefore, this approach expands the surrounding real world environment by superimposing computer-generated information. It presents the information more intuitively than legacy interfaces such as paper-based instruction manuals enabling the users to interact directly with the information and use their natural spatial processing ability. This paper will identify augmented reality tools and techniques with the potential to support efficient training systems for maintenance and assembly skills that accelerate the technicians' acquisition of new maintenance procedures. A platform for multimodal Augmented Reality based training will be proposed which could allow small to medium sized companies to develop and implement appropriate maintenance tasks based upon cost effective and efficient training systems. Such systems would give technicians' the opportunity for practical training, that is, the possibility to "learn by doing" in the workplace; provide information when and where needed, thus reducing the technicians' information search time; and potentially reduce errors due to violations in procedure, misinterpretation of facts, or insufficient training. A detailed bibliography on these topics is also provided.