Supporting Disassembly in Remanufacturing with Augmented Reality

The disassembly of products is a crucial process step in remanufacturing. Due to the high complexity caused by different variants and conditions of the used products to be dismantled, disassembly in remanufacturing has in general a low degree of automation. At present, employees are usually supported by static instructions and descriptions, which are often ambiguous and therefore may lead to errors. Augmented reality (AR) can reduce these disadvantages by guiding employees systematically through the disassembly process, taking the positioning and orientation of employee and product into account. However, SMEs in particular shy away from using AR applications to support disassembly processes, both because of concerns about high costs and insufficient programming expertise.Software Development Kits (SDK) are a possible solution to implement AR applications with rather low effort and costs. Therefore, a suitable SDK was selected, considering costs and functional scope. Using a practical example, the results of different tracking possibilities and illuminance levels are compared. Finally, the applicability to support disassembly processes with an AR application is demonstrated using an example product.