A systematic review of Augmented Reality content-related techniques for knowledge transfer in maintenance applications

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) has experienced an increasing trend in applied research in the last few years. This emerging trend is focused in content-related challenges: mainly creation (Authoring), adaptation (Context-Awareness) and improvement (Interaction-Analysis) of augmented content. Research in these techniques has enabled Academia to recognise Augmented Reality capability for knowledge transfer, either from AR systems to users or between users. But to the best of author's knowledge, there are no specific literature review in these areas, neither on their relations with AR knowledge transfer ability. Therefore, this paper aims to identify these relations through an analysis of state-of-the-art techniques in Authoring (A), Context-Awareness (CA) and Interaction-Analysis (IA) in the context of maintenance applications. In order to do so, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been conducted on 74 application-relevant papers from 2012 to 2017. It comprised a thematic analysis to establish the relation between maintenance applications, research in A, CA and IA and AR knowledge transfer modes. Its results helped to classify AR maintenance-applications by technological readiness levels. They also revealed the potential of AR for users' knowledge capture, and future research required for full knowledge management capabilities. Furthermore, the SLR method proposed could be extended to correlate AR systems and applications by their knowledge management capabilities in any AR application context.

A Review on Augmented Reality Tracking Methods for Maintenance of Robots

“…The objective of this research is to review existing solutions implemented for maintenance of robots. The method used to conduct this review was inspired by similar reviews in this field [4], [15]. These papers conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) which is defined by Booth et al [19] as a "systematic, explicit, and reproducible method for identifying, evaluating, and synthesising the existing body of completed and recorded work made by researchers, scholars, and practitioners.…”

“…On the aspect of maintenance, there have been several reviews conducted that provides an overview on the state of AR for maintenance. For instance, Fernández del Amo et al [15] conducted a systematic review on content-related techniques used for knowledge transfer in the field of maintenance. The maintenance criteria defined in the paper are assembly, design, diagnosis, management, repair, and training on medium to long life complex assets regardless of industry.…”

Analysis, design and development of a framework focused on augmented reality applications: Medical rounds case

“…The first research area is context-awareness. It is described in different research papers [8] [9] [10] as those software techniques and methods that use information about the environment to "characterize augmented content" as messages, instructions, or alerts to the AR users. The second area is "Authoring", described as software techniques aiming to create augmented content through the information and data supplied by an expert or trained staff [8] [11] [12].…”

Real-Time Remote Maintenance Support Based on Augmented Reality (AR)

“…Based on that concept, a considerable amount of research effort has been put on the design and development of real-time maintenance support tools and applications based on mobile devices to prevent unnecessary errors from happening [3][4][5][6]. With the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as well as the massive break out of augmented reality (AR), the research community extended that approach by exploiting the advantages of AR for data projection during the maintenance operations [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Generally, under the framework of Industry 4.0 in an…”