Mixed Μock-up Μeets ErgoCAM: Feasibility Study for Prospective Ergonomic Evaluation of Manual Assembly Processes in Real-Time Using Augmented Reality and Markerless Posture Analysis

The sustainable planning of production systems and processes requires a high degree of flexibility in the processes, both in terms of the production methods used and scalability, in order to be able to react to changing requirements at short notice. These requirements often hamper companies’ efforts to guarantee health-promoting working conditions and systems as the workload involved in a correspondingly short-cycle analysis and evaluation of stressors would be too great. As a result, the individual needs of employees, such as adapting the workplace to suit personal constitutional traits, are often not taken into account sufficiently. In order to address this problem, two prototypical systems for digitally supported workplace design are tested in this paper. The focus lies on a mixed mock-up demonstrator, which combines classic mock-up planning with augmented reality technology and enables the generation of individualized manual assembly workstations. This demonstrator is used and examined in conjunction with ErgoCAM, a prototype of a markerless system, to evaluate individual postures in real time. The aim is to ascertain which benefits the combination of the systems offers with regard to the flexible and early ergonomic evaluation of assembly workstations in practice. Specifically, in a feasibility study, it is examined to which extent a reliable ergonomic evaluation of assembly operations is possible by combining the two prototypes.