Augmented reality is been growing strong over the last few years, today we are introducing our readers to the new frontier in productivity, the smart equipment by Daqri will get your company to step up its game by not only providing unheard-of capabilities to your team but also by bridging gaps in your workflow. Here is the first look at some of the Daqri gears, their stats and applications concerning industry-specific objectives. The perks of an AR-equipped team are immediately obvious and in the long run, would make the difference in a successful strategic approach toward productivity and workflow optimization.

Growing demand and use cases

The use cases are growing by the same rate of product development taking on more industries by the day in their stride, for construction, manufacturing, automotive and more we already can provide showcases of results showing the tremendous impact that this tech is having on certain specific processes. Here are a few examples: Modern days manufacturing includes assembling hundreds or thousands of parts in a precise manner as fast as possible. No matter whether you’re producing smartphones or jet engines, a new set of assembly instructions is required with every product every step of the way. AR can effectively cut training times and costs and also provide an extremely valuable alternative to keeping more experienced personnel up to date. Learning how to work with complex machines such as gas turbines takes up to three years. The trainee must go through a rigorous and specific course to acquire the theoretical fundamentals, followed by a 7 weeks hand-on training.

The trainee then proceeds to onsite training with an experienced turbine fitter Gas burner assembly is an important part of this training process. Siemens is been partnering with DAQRI to build an augmented reality (AR) App to guide the user on the burner assembly. This AR App runs on the DAQRI Smart Helmet (DSH), and guides the user through the assembly, step-by-step. Although the notion of projecting assembly information on a heads-up display may be fairly novel, assisting with complex assembly is already a tried-and-tested AR application.

“Technically, AR has been used for this for the last 20 years,” noted Milan Kocic, Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence’s business development manager for product experience and innovation. Kocic has a very cool job concealed by a very long title, and it makes him uniquely qualified to weigh in on augmented reality in manufacturing: “I’m lucky enough to get to go to places like CES and other forward-looking tradeshows which ordinarily have nothing to do with [Hexagon MI’s] business, but I go to look at where the trends are going. What are the big companies trying to do? How is technology developing? I try to predict what the future might hold for us two, three, five or ten years from today.” This has given Kocic a valuable perspective on up-and-coming technologies, as well as how far they’ve really come. “In aerospace manufacturing,” he said, “you have assembly assistance, where there are projectors that show the next fastener placement and that sort of thing. What makes augmented reality different today is mostly size and capability. It’s like 3D printing: the printers were very slow and expensive 20 years ago. Now, they’re just cheaper and faster.” Credits: engineering.com

Where we come in

DesignDiverso can provide ad-hoc implementation and customized software for these gears for any specific use case, our team of AR experts can guarantee a timely and successful project execution which will enhance your productivity while saving big on current training, assembling and servicing costs. 
Regardless of your industry, we got you covered, here are some facts on how AR equipment can leverage your current productivity: 

Being able to see a machine’s status simply by glancing at it through an augmented reality display is incredibly powerful, AR can be useful for far more than just error detection. This video from Daqri shows how augmented reality can be applied to maintenance procedures.

For any assembly-line machinery, there are several steps involving the actual assembly processes. Starting off from the components that will actually shape the machines into existence. 
When all the elements of the machines have been produced, the assembly can take place, the productivity and effectiveness of servicing can be drastically enhanced by such AR tools.

Another great application of such tech is quality assurance (QA) and metrology.

Just in Automotiveit reported on a program running at a PCNA (Porsche Cars North America). A proof of concept is been already carried out successfully by the company at Daimler facility in Bremenusing augmented reality as a tool in the quality assurance process.

“The ‘Tech Live Look’ system connects technicians to remote experts via smart glasses and is said to shorten service resolution times by up to 40 pc. The remote experts can watch a high-definition live video of what the technician is seeing in the workshop, provide feedback, and project step-by-step technical bulletins and schematic drawings on the glasses to guide the technician. They can take screenshots and enlarge images, and the technician can open and view documents while working hands-free.”

According to Porche, Tech Live Look is going live at three of Porsche’s 189 US dealerships, with 75 expected to use it by the end of 2018 and most of the network to use it in 2019.

Here is an interesting article about first Daqri construction partner in the UK Skanska Thomas Faulkner, Executive Vice President, Skanska UK, said:

“This trial demonstrates our commitment to exploring on-site new digital technology, collaborating with technical partners to give us the potential to transform the way we work.

“If, as an industry, we are to deliver on the targets set in the Construction 2025 strategy, we need to be innovative in our thinking. It will help us to be more efficient, delivering projects more quickly while reducing costs and carbon.

“It’s very exciting to be working with DAQRI during the course of this year to see how we can benefit from their diverse perspective, to challenge the industry’s traditional working practices.”

Here is a look at how Aprilia racing team is speeding up repairing and servicing of bikes in the paddocks.  

Given manufacturing’s seemingly relentless trend toward increasing automation, one might naturally wonder whether augmented reality and automation are competing with one another. Why worrying about improving a worker’s access to information if that person will soon be replaced by a robot?

When presented with the question is AR competing or cooperating with automation, a representative of DAQRI, the company which makes the DAQRI Smart Helmet, had this to say:

“[The] DAQRI Smart Helmet cooperates with automation because it uses common protocols and standards, it is designed to integrate to DCSs, PLCs, SCADAs, Histograms, CMMSs, and ERPs, making information previously constrained to the control room available right on the helmet, wherever the worker goes.”

From the software side, Eldritch offered a somewhat different perspective:

“I think it is competing with automation, but in a good way. A lot of the companies we work with have unions concerned that by improving the efficiency of workers, we’ll be taking away jobs. But what augmented reality does is enable you to leverage context awareness via the Internet of Things to gather information about the environment and then feed that to the worker.”

“All these technologies that are coming together around artificial intelligence are going to augment the capabilities of the worker and that’s very powerful. I call it Augmented Intelligence. The idea is that you can take someone of a certain skill level and by augmenting them with artificial intelligence via augmented reality and the Internet of Things, you can elevate the skill level of that worker.”

“So, I think that as more jobs get automated we’re also going to be pushing more workers up the skill-chain, which will make them more competitive in the market. So augmented reality and automation may compete in the near-term, but I think there will eventually be cooperation between automated machines and augmented human workers.”

Kocic offered a similar view, with specific reference to the robotic cells already in factories today:

“If you look at any automation cell, there’s a big cage around it.  There’s a bunch of robots moving around, loading stations, unloading stations, et cetera. How do you control that? There might be a dashboard or a small screen, but there’s very limited information pointing to where any problems might be.”

“I think AR is a much more collaborative tool, where you can walk up to a cell, ask some feedback questions and get responses through the AR that tell you where everything is. So, this robot might need service, or it will say ‘Look, you’ve got a problem on this load station,’ and then deliver some statistical data from measurements to try to point you in a better direction, affecting how the production runs.”

“So I always see AR in that way: allowing you to collaborate with the automation cells to address any issues that might come up,” Kocic added. 

Credits: engineering.com