Interactive Visual Guide System for Learning Manual Work

ABSTRACT In manufacturing factories, it is important to reduce costs and to ensure product quality in stiffer market competition. With the massive retirement of expert engineers in aging society, an effective training/education scheme for new workers is desired. However, cell production system is widely used lately and each worker is supposed to do every step of the process and thus the worker should learn more and more kinds of manufacturing skills and process. It is also desired that fresh workers can learn the skills by themselves, however, transferring skills is a very difficult issue. Learning by print-based manuals is not effective, because it is not easy to understand how to operate 3D objects and how the process transition goes from 2D documents. Besides, flipping the pages to find the information during the work is troublesome. In this research, a new training system is built with a movable head-up display, which can be adapted to actual workspaces and allows the user to access the digitized guidance contents with semitransparent touch-sensitive screen. The effectiveness is experimentally shown by applying the proposed system for some tasks to make "origami", a kind of skillful paper craft works.