Teach Me How! Interactive Assembly Instructions Using Demonstration and In-Situ Projection

When ordering a product the options to personalize or customize the items have increased over the last years. This flexibility has lead to an increasing number of variants in manufactured products. As storing produced items is expensive, companies tend to produce their products lean, i.e. in smaller lot sizes just when they are needed. This lean manufacturing creates more flexible production environments. In our work, we investigate how human workers can be assisted to work in such demanding environments. Therefore, Augmented Reality systems can be used to provide work instructions. First, in this chapter we provide a comprehensive overview about Augmented Reality approaches to support workers directly at the workplace and introduce an assistive system for providing in-situ instructions. Through three user studies, we evaluate the general impact of in-situ instructions, evaluate three instruction creation strategies, and finally evaluate the created instructions using a real product assembly task.