The Human Being at the Center of Smart Factories Thanks to Augmented Reality

Nowadays, the interaction of new technologies with humans can offer many advantages. Some of them can be found in the production environment, where the human being retrieved a central role thanks to Augmented Reality (AR). This can augment the human capabilities, compensating the respective limitations and providing benefits in terms of the overall system performances. This paper reports the implementation of an AR system for an industrial grinding process helping the operator, to comlpy working tolerances, with a repeatability comparable to that of an automatic system. An experimental campaign was initially run to identify the best user interface to be used in the process. After that, the interface with the best performance, evaluated on experimental results both from the operators' feedbacks, was used in a grinding operation. The outcome of the process highlighted that, with respect to the standard operation without any aid, the usage AR allowed to achieve better performances and quality.