2010 Volume 15 Issue 2 Pages 183-189
In manufacturing factories, it is important to achieve a good balance between cost reduction and product quality in increasingly competitive markets. With the massive retirement of expert engineers in aging society, an effective training scheme for new workers is desired. However, cell production system is widely used lately and each worker is supposed to carry out every step in the process and thus the worker should learn more and more kinds of manufacturing skills and tasks. It is also desired that fresh workers can learn the skills by themselves, however, transferring skills is a very difficult issue. Learning by print-based manuals is not effective, because it is not easy to read the physical operations and the process transitions from paper documents. Besides, flipping the pages to find the information during the work is troublesome. In this research, a new training system is built with a movable head-up display, which can be adapted to actual workspaces and allows the user to access digitized guidance contents with a semitransparent touch-sensitive display. The effectiveness is experimentally shown by applying the proposed system to a typical skillful manual work of origami paper craft.
