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Project Status - February 2011

ManuVAR follows a semi-agile iterative development process. The first year of the project was dedicated to the system design. During the second year there will be four implementation-trial iterations in the laboratory environment, and finally, the third and last year of the project will be dedicated to demonstration activities on the factory floor.

The second trial of the ManuVAR technology took place at Tecnalia (San Sebastian, Spain) in mid-December 2010. The following four application tools were tested:

  • Remote instruction delivery with augmented video streaming. Case: Remote support and corrective maintenance in the railway sector (NEM);
  • Workload analysis with marker-based body tracking. Case: Design and testing of existing or virtual production processes in SMEs (IPA TP);
  • Procedure validation with hierarchical task analysis and product loading through the virtual model. Case: Off-line application for aerospace integration and testing (TAS-I);
  • Skills training with a haptic feedback device and virtual environment. Case: Metallographic Replica Technique in power plants (Tecantom).

During the trial, these tools were evaluated in the lab environment by a multidisciplinary team of internal technical, human factors and application experts. It was found that the project results achieved so far are well accepted by the industry partners. The lessons learned in Trial 1 will be accounted in the updated project documentation.

The next trial will take place at VTT (Tampere, Finland) at the end of March 2011. At this trial the improved application tools will be tested in the context of joint application of several tools in more realistic industry cases. While the planned trial is again going to be conducted in the laboratory environment, there will be more end-users from industry partners participating in the tests. The R&D part of the project will culminate with the last trial in the beginning of June 2011 and after that the project will proceed to the demonstrations stage on the factory floor.