A major challenge for the industry is to provide maintenance operators in the field with the right information about their mission and its operational context. Productivity, efficiency, quality improvement and flexibility are factors of utmost importance.
Carried out in 2017, the SUMATRA project (SUpport aux techniciens de MAintenance sur Terminaux mobiles en Réalité Augmentée) aimed to imagine the tools and uses of maintenance operators of the future, taking advantage of the current uses of mobile terminals (smartphones, tablets) and augmented reality.
The SUMATRA project is an academic research project and ran from 2017 to 2019.
Immersalis has worked in collaboration with the ESTIA Institute of Engineering institute to design and develop multimodal prototypes allowing access to and enrichment of the documentation by maintenance operators in the field.
To carry out this work, we relied on preliminary work of activity analysis carried out by the PEPSS platform of ESTIA, highlighting a major characteristic: the will to preserve the use of paper documentation, which is nowadays the majority practice.
We hence designed a multi-device environment combining the strengths of tablet and phone interaction, augmented reality and digital pen.
This project was the subject of a scientific publication at the Ergo'AI 2018 conference: link to the open access article on HAL
By pinning the virtual documentation to a real engine or electric board, the maintenance technician can benefit from an enriched and contextualized documentation. The AR headset (a Microsoft hololens) can also be used to take pictures.
The digital pen enables paper documentation to be enriched in a natural way, with annotations, diagrams, etc. These enrichments are directly synchronized within the information system and then reviewed, validated and integrated into the official documentation.
The tablet and the smartphone play a similar role in displaying and manipulating the documentation. This technical redundancy does not prevent the two devices from being used in a complementary way, each one having its own preferred functionalities (visualization on the tablet or photo-taking by the smartphone for example).
