MAUI: Tele-assistance for Maintenance of Cyber-physical Systems

Philipp Fleck, Fernando Reyes-Aviles, Christian Pirchheim, Clemens Arth, Dieter Schmalstieg

Abstract: In this paper, we present the maintenance assistance user interface (MAUI), a novel approach for providing tele-assistance to a worker charged with maintenance of a cyber-physical system. Such a system comprises both physical and digital interfaces, making it challenging for a worker to understand the required steps and to assess work progress. A remote expert can access the digital interfaces and provide the worker with timely information and advice in an augmented reality display. The remote expert has full control over the user interface of the worker in a manner comparable to remote desktop systems. The worker needs to perform all physical operations and retrieve physical information, such as reading physical labels or meters. Thus, worker and remote expert collaborate not only via shared audio, video or pointing, but also share control of the digital interface presented in the augmented reality space. We report results on two studies: The first study evaluates the benefits of ou