Resumen de Augmented reality for the enhancement of product assurance and safety
1. Research justification A growing number of companies in the aerospace industry are already leading projects to deploy Augmented Reality (AR) to improve their workplace performance, knowledge transfer, as well as workforce productivity. In parallel, national and international agencies in aerospace, such as the European Space Agency (ESA), are running studies to evaluate the application of AR to enhance the quality and cost effectiveness of space missions.
The main role of space product assurance and safety (PA&S) engineers is to assure the quality and safety of space hardware and software in order to enable mission success, which they achieve by applying methods and tools during the design and development phase of space products (hardware and software). In particular, a key added value of PA&S is to prevent errors before the manufacturing of space products, and to detect and mitigate or correct them should they occur. It is demonstrated that most of these errors in industrial manufacturing (and maintenance) activities are related to procedural errors and therefore preventable. These errors are not due to lack of information, but to not having or having but not using the right information at the right time. AR technology offers potential for achieving this objective, which in turn should lead to increased productivity by reducing time to completion (including manual and cognitive activities) and eliminating errors, and eventually reducing the mental workload, when compared to traditional media for task instruction. Paradoxically, despite the potential benefits that can be inferred from the application of mixed reality technologies in an industrial environment, the industrial application of AR is still quite very limited.
Consequently, motivated by the potential benefits that AR can offer to the field of space product assurance and safety and the limited research found to analyse the user factors that determine the adoption of AR as a technological solution in the space engineering domain, the author performed a study to fill in such research gap, as well as to design and develop a low cost AR prototype to demonstrate the application of the technology in the field of PA&S.
The main goal of the research sought to address the following research questions: 1. Is the space PA&S community ready to adopt AR? and 2. Is AR technology ready for use in PA&S for space industry projects? In particular, the results of the research shall allow the ranking of selected use cases in order of priority to the stakeholders by determining the most likely drivers of adoption and the highest barriers to the introduction of AR.
In addition, a secondary goal of the research was to develop an AR technology demonstrator (proof of concept) based on the outcome of research questions above. The demonstrator was intended to implement critical functions derived from the most demanded scenario(s) for the demonstration of AR in a laboratory environment.
2. Research Methodology To answer the first research question, a multi-method mix approach was performed combining desk research with a quantitative (online) survey extended by follow-up qualitative semi-structured (phone) interviews. The online survey to assess the sample population’s preference for different use cases was developed and implemented on the SurveyMonkey.com platform. To help ensure input gathered would be invariant of the different level of exposure to and prior experience of AR of the participants in the study, an introductory video was prepared. The video introduced a selection of five animated mock-ups of possible use cases for space product assurance and safety that were selected from an initial set of ten.
After responding to the online survey, participants were offered to participate in a follow-up phone interview (see Appendix C). Six follow up interviews were conducted with industry representatives and four with ESA personnel.
The statistical data collected from the survey was analysed using an R project for statistical computing script written to extract the P values in SPSS statistical programming language. The univariate analysis of statistical data for the desirability and feasibility variables of use cases was represented graphically by box-and-whisker plots. Afterwards, the drivers and barriers for the adoption of AR are presented, followed by a Pearson correlation test with the use cases to support their selection.
To answer the second research question, the maturity of many current AR-enabling technology components and AR solutions was assessed, with a focus on those components necessary to meet requirements for use cases that survey participants indicated would have the greatest near-term potential for impact in space product assurance and safety. To perform this assessment, the Technology Readiness Level definitions of ISO 16290 were followed.
For the secondary goal of the research, a cost-efficient AR prototype demonstrator or breadboard was developed to demonstrate the preferred user scenarios identified during the research phase. A set of experiment instructions were prepared to perform the validation of the proof of concept, and to serve as a guide for experimental demonstration.
3. Main Conclusions The results of the research reveal that professionals in the area of PA&S have relatively low awareness of AR, but once exposed to the concept believe that it has potential to improve compliance and reduce errors. The research concludes that only a limited number of use cases are desirable and feasible for adoption by the PA&S community, limited to delivering contextually sensitive instructions (procedural guidance), and configuration control (including real-time recognition of configuration errors).
In parallel with the survey of space industry professionals, the project also conducted detailed research into the requirements of the space industry use cases and the maturity of the technology components. This research reveals that the maturity of many components is insufficient for implementation of AR technology and systems in the space industry broadly.
One of the main limitations of the research conducted is that results are dependant of the immediate benefits perceived by the implementation of AR in the workplace, which are specific for the PA&S community and cannot be easily extrapolated to other business units or industrial environments.
Future research follow-up and a business analysis for AR implementation in the area of PA&S are also part of the thesis.
