Challenges and opportunities on AR/VR technologies for manufacturing systems in the context of industry 4.0: A state of the art review

Manufacturing industries are currently experiencing the fourth revolution with penetration of new immersive technologies extremely focused on the flexible manufacturing and human machine interaction. The immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have received much attention among the manufacturing industries to achieve mass production and mass customization for different product variants. This paper demonstrates the research progress and developments in the AR/VR technologies for product design and evaluation, Repair & Maintenance, Assembly, Warehouse management, Quality control, Plant layout and CNC simulation. The critical challenges in AR/VR technology implementation at hardware and software level and opportunities for the further developments are discussed.