Investigating the Application of Augmented Reality to Support Wire Harness Activities

In the industrial context, the wire harness represents a process with a high degree of manual work and significant customizability of final products. To reduce the workers' mental demand, the augmented reality (AR) can be an effective tool. The existing industrial applications mainly focus on manual assembly assistance, but few solutions have been developed for the wire harness. This paper tries to enhance such a process by supporting operators with an AR application that shows the work instructions and allows reducing their cognitive workload. The main goals are to propose a user-friendly and versatile tool and carry out a structured and complete evaluation of the user experience. Two experimental sessions were conducted in the laboratory by simulating the wire harness assembly and quality inspection. The use of the AR application is efficient and effective especially when instructions far from theworkstation are considered as a reference.