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View digital contents in augmented reality
Improve engine production chain by leveraging Augmented Reality services for training, maintenance, and remote assistance.
In the scope of training, operators shall be able to learn the steps necessary to assemble a boat engine and manage customer machinery. The operator, wearing a smart helmet and using augmented reality technologies, sees all the steps to perform each activity.
To support maintenance, the operator using a helmet is able to search for instructions in the manual without having to use their hands, ensuring safety in their job. In addition to instruction checks, the operator can ask for remote support, allowing the remote support team to connect to the helmet and share what the operator sees in real-time.
Fastweb is an Italian telecommunications company headquartered in Milan. It provides network, telco, and IT services to a diverse clientele, ranging from consumers to enterprises, including industrial customers. As a leader in 5G technology, Fastweb has established itself as a key player in the industry.
Fastweb has forged strategic partnerships with industrial clients, evolving into a comprehensive IT service provider. One notable initiative is the Industrie 4.0 project, which leverages Fastweb's network connectivity and AWS Cloud services to create augmented reality solutions. This collaboration aims to revolutionize industrial operations, enhancing efficiency and innovation.
Reply developed for Fastweb an end to end solution made of two applications: one for training and another for maintenance. The solution leverages on Microsoft Hololens as helmet device and AWS cloud as backend service architecture to manage content, handle user profiles and authentication and to exposed them via API to the helmet. Thanks to the backend designed on AWS services it is ready for future expansion via new services and integration with other industrial processes.
Hololens enables the user to view digital contents in augmented reality and provides context information in real-time and interact with it via gestures and voice (hands free). Helmet interacts via Rest API with the backend in cloud. Backend uses AWS serverless services to exposed APIs leveraging on: AWS API Gateway for API exposure, AWS Lambda for computing, AWS RDS for relational database, AWS S3 and AWS CloudFront for content storage-retrieval, AWS Cognito for operator authentication.
Thanks to AWS services the customer has been able to store and provide very fast Augmented Reality content which by nature have a high size due to images audio and video resulting in a very good user experience for the operators.
The usage of AWS Cognito for authentication allowed to speed-up the entire project development as the entire user management, secure authentication and authorization where already available with an enterprise grade security and fully integrated with AWS API Gateway.
Finally, the computing layer build on top of AWS Lambda and AWS RDS dramatically reduced the time to market for the project and reduced the overall TCO by reducing operation task.
Project outcomes includes improvements in maintainers training: the Hololens application drives the worker through several procedures (e.g., engine assembly/disassembly) that the worker can perform on a test engine without the active presence of a trainer. Moreover, also the maintenance procedures have been sped up: with a procedure illustrated
step-by-step to the maintainer it was possible to decrease errors during maintenance procedures.
Finally, was possible for maintenance unit to identify systematic problems that was previously difficult to identify.
The application record the activities conducted by all the workers and display these data to an administration console. In this manner, by correlating data from different operators, it was possible to identify issues such as, for example, if a specific engine is frequently under service, or if a particular step of a procedure takes longer that others, or if a particular worker sistematically needs more time to complete some operations.