A User Study on AR-assisted Industrial Assembly

The utilization of modern assistance system e.g. Augmented Reality (AR) has reached into industrial assembly scenarios. Beside the technical realization of AR assistance in the assembly scene the worker has to accept the new technology. Only both, user acceptance and technical user-interface design leads to an optimized overall system. Hence, this contribution gives a brief literature overview and analysis about AR acceptance and acceptance modeling. Then, a proprietary model for acceptance measurement is developed, which includes and synthesizes previous models (TAM and UTAUT) and simplifies them considerably for the purpose of industrial assembly. Following, a laboratory experiment is set-up in the FHWS c-Factory, which is a smart, IoT-based production environment. A survey and an assembly cycle time measurement is conducted to collect data to characterize AR assistance. The study participants assemble a toy truck once without and once with AR support. The evaluation shows that the mean assembly time decreases. The results show also, that AR is accepted by the participants supporting their work.