A Collaborative XR Platform for Streamlining Industrial Maintenance Activities

In the realm of smart manufacturing, Extended Reality (XR) technologies stand as transformative tools capable of deeply reshaping the industrial landscape. XR has been extensively adopted across various industries, particularly for optimizing complex tasks such as product maintenance and repair. Nevertheless, many industries continue to rely solely on traditional approaches, resulting in low efficiency and productivity. This is often due to the challenges encountered in adopting effective XR solutions to provide comprehensive instructions during maintenance activities. This paper introduces an innovative XR platform tailored to foster collaboration between the technical office and maintainers. Specifically, this platform facilitates maintenance and repair operations on industrial products through close collaboration between a skilled user utilizing a VR application and an inexperienced operator utilizing an AR application. This cooperation is made possible by integrating and concurrently deploying these applications, which communicate via a central server managing the connection in a host/client model. The objective is to propose an innovative solution for streamlining maintenance tasks for less experienced users under the guidance of expert maintainers, while also enhancing their training proficiency.