Extended Reality in End of Arm Tooling Development and Assembly

Abstract

The emerging technologies presented by the fourth industrial revolution present new opportunities across the entire industrial sector. Among those paradigms that have seen rapid and significant growth in recent years are Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), collectively known as Extended Reality (XR). These technologies provide a wide range of unexplored solutions across the manufacturing industry, that promise to improve the effectiveness and speed of various existing processes. One such activity that could potentially stand to benefit from XR is the project and development of End of Arm Tooling (EOAT) for robot applications.The initial purpose of this work is to first study the XR technologies, their current applications across various industries, and the hardware and software involved in their use and development. Then, the main goal is to develop XR solutions to aid in the project, development, and assembly of EOAT systems for extracting injected parts from a mould. Checking in with industry professionals throughout the development of a VR application, the functionalities were tailored to their needs.