AR-Assisted Guidance for Assembly and Maintenance of Avionics Equipment

Abstract

The assembly and maintenance of products in the aviation industry constitute a crucial aspect of the product life cycle, with numerous tasks still reliant on manual operations. In order to solve the problem of narrow operation spaces and blind areas in the processes of manual assembly and maintenance, we proposed an augmented reality (AR) assistant guidance method specifically designed for such scenarios. By employing a multi-modality anti-occlusion tracking algorithm, pose data of assembly parts can be obtained, upon which AR guidance information is displayed. Additionally, we proposed an assembly step identification method to alleviate user interaction pressure. We developed an AR visualization assistant guidance system and designed and conducted a user evaluation experiment to measure the learnability, usability, and mental effort required. The results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances training efficiency by 128.77%, as well as improving assembly and maintenance efficiency by 29.53% and 27.27% compared with traditional methods. Moreover, it has significant advantages in learnability, usability, and mental effort, providing a feasible and effective resolution for addressing blind areas during assembly and maintenance within the aviation industry.