State of the Art and Future Perspectives of Industrial Augmented Reality: Application in Smart Manufacturing

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the technologies of Industry 4.0 that can contribute significantly to smart manufacturing processes by increasing performance efficiency. AR started its development path last century and has already been integrated into the manufacturing industry. Yet there are still a lot of challenges that prevent it from being massively used. To understand how this technology should be enhanced further to achieve a successful future, it is important to gain a comprehensive overview of this advanced technology to define its strengths and weaknesses, and what issues should be addressed. Concerning the above-mentioned issue, it was decided to screen possible pathways of how AR can contribute to the manufacturing processes in the future. To achieve this goal the current state of the technology was examined, as well as its challenges and future perspectives from the point of view of the current AR and manufacturing experts in comparison to the future talents were discovered. As for the implementation methodology, the triangulation method was applied. Thus, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. Interviews with 6 experts in the sphere of AR and/or manufacturing were conducted. Moreover, a survey with 86 students was run. The information gained from the analysis of primary and secondary data allowed us to review and realize the current condition of AR development and exploitation. It was revealed that the extent of AR device utilization is lower than expected, and it still stays at the piloting stage. It is due to the existence of a considerable number of problems on the technical and organizational sides. Addressing these issues would boost AR deployment considerably. In general, it is believed by current experts that in 3-10 years most of the difficulties will be solved and it would be possible to apply Augmented Reality systems in manufacturing processes with maximum efficiency, however, future talents are still doubtful about the further development of the technology