Assistance systems to support production, assembly and quality assurance are currently not very widespread in SMEs. In order to support employees in production with such modern technologies in the future, "new mobile solutions are needed in particular that can be used anywhere in the company and are not tied to stationary workstations," explains Professor Carsten Röcker, project manager and director at the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT).

This is the starting point for the "MARI" research project, which was launched in mid-July and is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with around 450,000 euros over a project period of four years. The project name MARI stands for "Augmented Reality Assistance Systems for Mobile Application Scenarios in Industry". In addition to the Institute (inIT) at OWL University, the companies Bosch Rexroth and Wassermann Technologie are involved in the research project as cooperation partners. The Fraunhofer Application Center IOSB-INA is providing scientific support for the project.

Together with the partners from industry and research, the scientists from Lemgo want to develop and evaluate the prototype of a modular and intelligent augmented reality-based assistance system for mobile application scenarios in SMEs.

Mobile, intelligent and modular

Regarding the aim of the research project, Röcker says: "The system to be developed will be mobile and is therefore suitable for many application scenarios. By learning new tasks during the one-time execution and covering a wide range of industrial activities, employees can also be supported using artificial intelligence." The modular structure should enable the system to be adapted quickly and easily to different activities in production, assembly or quality assurance. According to inIT, the system can recognize and analyse work activities multimodally thanks to the integrated sensor technology and use this to create models for the future assistance of manual activities.

The modular design should also allow different interaction components to be combined depending on the application: "Various interaction devices can be connected via a generic interface, such as wearables, AR data glasses or eye trackers, which can be combined with each other," says Röcker, explaining the procedure. This allows employees to use the right interaction devices for the current application: For example, they can switch from a tablet with projection to AR glasses if they need their hands free to repair a system.

For the Lemgo scientists, intelligent assistance systems are the key to making the increasing complexity of systems manageable for people.