Reducing Errors in Aircraft Maintenance and Assembly using Augmented Reality

Research Aims
This research explores Augmented Reality as a novel tool to increase the safety of air travel, by enhancing the efficacy of human operators at undertaking proper Aircraft maintenance and assembly procedures.
Augmented Reality (AR) is a term used to identify a set of technologies that allows the view of real world environments to be augmented by computer-generated elements or objects. This creates an environment in which real and virtual objects coexist. Virtual objects can act as if they are aware of their environment, and respond to interactions.
Many hardware devices can create this experience, such as optical see-through head mounted displays, like the Microsoft HoloLens 2, or video pass-through VR devices that render a view of the physical world, using externally-mounted cameras on a conventional VR headset.
The focus is on creating a stronger closed loop between existing analog/digital aircraft maintenance/assembly systems and the human operator that is deploying them. The research aims to exploit emerging cyber-physical systems.
Research Objectives
The research objective is to reduce or eliminate errors that are committed during Aircraft assembly and maintenance. Safety during air travel is an important priority - errors in this field can cost millions in equipment damage, billions in brand damage, and immeasurable cost to the families of victims.
Augmented Reality is being explored as a tool to detect which component of an aircraft is currently being worked on, in order to overlay the current instruction-set directly over the component, enhancing maintenance deployment with contextually-relevant 3D diagrams and animations. An arrow in the operator's field of view can point to the correct component, and display an animation of how this component is correctly disassembled following Airbus protocol.
The bigger picture is to effectively merge the strategic and operational systems that govern aircraft maintenance with the day-to-day execution of the aircraft operator on the ground. This involves researching effective frameworks/processes to allow non-AR specialists within the organisation to author/update maintenance instructions for Augmented Reality, with a vision towards automating this process.
A few off-the-shelf solutions currently exist to tackle this area, such as Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Guides for HoloLens 2. From a research perspective, the efficacy of these tools remains to be investigated. Examples from the literature point towards promising results using these types of tools, and the off-the-self solutions provide a good starting platform to research even better solutions and user interfaces that maximise helpfulness and minimise obtrusiveness and complexity.
Novel Research Methodology
No qualitative or quantitative investigation currently exists into the efficacy of different off-the-shelf solutions in the area of AR maintenance and authoring.
Primary key performance metrics for these tools include task completion time, number of errors made and cognitive load. Measuring these factors in different AR solutions can help determine which interface elements and arrangements have the most impact, which in turn paves the way towards designing better solutions, grounded in empirical human-factors research.
Investigation into this field will first be based in the university research centre with a student cohort. In a later stage, the investigation will be conducted with Airbus operators, as this cohort is the end-user target for this technology.
Research Deliverables
A proof-of-concept AR system that explores the value that AR can achieve in reducing errors in aircraft maintenance and assembly. This can be used as a reference point for further investigations into Industrial AR and executive decision-making.