Manual PCB assembly using Augmented Reality towards Total Quality

Despite the fourth wave of industry automation, the so-called Industry 4.0, manual assembly still remains as an important step to many products and is responsible for employing a lot of workers. But manual assembly is prone to errors, is time consuming and boring. One of the enabling technologies of Industry 4.0, Augmented Reality (AR) plays a major role on helping manual assembly by providing on-demand guidance. The technology can also support monitoring features that are compliant to Total Quality Management (TQM) requirements which seeks to minimize errors and maximize quality. This paper reviews the research on using AR to aid manual assembly and presents requirements and the architecture design for an AR system applied to the context of manual assembly of Printed Circuit Boards (PCB). Four device configurations and SDKs were evaluated to be applied in industrial processes of manual assembly of PCB. The paper explores particulars of the task, product and workers towards a novel AR system to fulfill high quality product expectations. This study shows that an AR-Based assembly need not to be expensive in order to be effective, it is shown that every assembly configuration has to be carefully assessed in order to achieve a proper system configuration.