Factory of the Future shaped by Augmented Reality

What does the Factory of the Future look like? Does it include autonomous robots? Drones? Virtual reality? There’s no way to know for sure. Or is there?

Professor Karthik Ramani of Purdue University is joining forces with manufacturers to build virtual factories using augmented reality -- so they can test new labor-saving technologies in the virtual world, before installing them in the real world.

Is an autonomous robot going to make a factory more productive? With augmented reality, they can physically simulate how workers will interact with a robot, or any other new technology. They can virtually experiment with rearranging their shop floor to maximize productivity. And if new technologies are successful, they can use augmented reality to train new workers -- in essence, they can become pre-skilled to work efficiently, before they ever set foot on the factory floor.

Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, Karthik Ramani’s lab at Purdue University is advancing the Future of Work, at the Human-Technology Frontier.