Frieder Loch

Fachhochschule Ostschweiz

While modern production systems are becoming increasingly technologically advanced, the presence of human operators remains fundamental in industrial workplaces. To complement and enhance the capabilities of human workers, approaches based on adaptive automation have been introduced. They consist of adapting the behavior of the system according to...

A trend, accompanying the change of automation systems and their architectures, is the virtualization of software components. Virtualization strengthens platform-independent development and the provision of secure and isolated applications. Virtualization introduces well-defined interfaces to strengthen modularity, which facilitates the scalability...

This paper aims at identifying ontological categories as higher-order knowledge structures that underlie engineering students’ thinking about technical systems. Derived from interviews, these ontological categories include, inter alia, a focus on the behavior, structure, or purpose of a technical system. We designed and administered a paper-based t...

This study analyzed the relative importance of different cognitive abilities for solving complex mathematical word problems (CWPs)—a demanding task of high relevance for diverse fields and contexts. We investigated the effects of spatial, verbal, numerical, and general reasoning abilities as well as gender on CWP performance among N = 1282 first-ye...

Virtual training systems can provide flexible and effective training for interactions with increasingly complex industrial machines. However, existing approaches do not adapt to the adaptive attributes of the user. Being able to track the current state of the user enables a humanization of virtual training system, since it allows analyzing the stra...

Modern production systems are becoming more and more complex to comply with diversified market needs, flexible production, and competitiveness. Despite technological progress, the presence of human operators is still fundamental in production plants, since they have the important role of supervising and monitoring processes, by interacting with suc...

The ACE Factories White Paper on 'Human-centred factories from theory to industrial practice. Lessons learned and recommendations' http://ace-factories.eu/wp-content/uploads/ACE-Factories-White-Paper.pdf

Today's innovation processes are interdisciplinary and require communication between stakeholders from different domains. The compatibility of mental models, which determine how individuals think about technical problems, decides the success of this communication. Previous research indicates that mechanical engineering students prefer procedural ov...

Modern automatic machines in production have been becoming more and more complex within the recent years. Thus, human-machine interfaces (HMI) reflect multiple different functions. An approach to improve human-machine interaction can be realised by adjusting the HMI to the operators’ requirements and complementing their individual skills and capabi...

The increasing complexity of manufacturing environments requires effective training systems to prepare the operation personnel for their tasks. Several training systems have been proposed. A common approach is the application of virtual environments to train interactions with an industrial machine in a safe, attractive, and efficient way. However,...

Human workers remain a crucial part of production environments for conducting manual assembly or maintenance procedures, despite increasing automation. These procedures cannot be automated due to small lot sizes and high product variability. Performing manual procedures requires the application of procedural knowledge and motor skills, such as bima...

With the increasing complexity of modern industrial automatic and robotic systems, an increasing burden is put on the operators, who are requested to supervise and interact with such complex systems, typically under challenging and stressful conditions. To overcome this issue, it is necessary to adopt a responsible approach based on the anthropocen...

Maintenance engineers deal with increasingly complex automated production systems, characterized by increasing computerization or the addition of robots that collaborate with human workers. The effects of changing or replacing components are difficult to assess since there are complex interdependencies between process parameters and components. The...

Many virtual training systems have been proposed to address the increasing complexity of manufacturing environments. However, existing training systems focus on visual interaction and neglect the haptic sense, which is a crucial component of manual tasks. This paper introduces a concept for a virtual training system for industrial procedures that i...

Augmented Reality-based applications are increasingly used in industrial scenarios. However, finding use cases that make good use of the characteristics of AR and are reasonable in terms of its creation effort is not straightforward. Only limited requirements and guidelines for identifying useful AR applications in industry can be found. In this pa...

Augmented Reality-based applications are increasingly used for industrial scenarios. However, finding use cases that make good use of the characteristics of AR and are reasonable in terms of its creation effort is not straightforward. Only limited requirements and guidelines for identifying useful AR applications in industry can be found. In this p...

Die Digitalisierung von Arbeitsumgebungen und das Mitarbeiter-Engagement sind zum strategischen Erfolgsfaktoren von Unternehmen geworden. Ferner gilt das Expertenwissen von komplexen technischen Prozessen als ein wertvolles Gut produzierender Unternehmen, dessen Dokumentation und Austausch einfach, intuitiv und effektiv gestaltet sein muss. Hierfür...

In dem Projekt AmbiWise wird ein Kollaborationssystem entwickelt und evaluiert, das auf der Digitalisierung bestehender Prozesse, deren Erweiterung um intuitive Benutzungsschnittstellen und multimediale Inhalte zum vereinfachten Wissensaustausch basiert. Ergebnisse einer entwicklungsbegleitenden Evaluation in Bezug auf Usability und unternehmensspe...

Devices from the consumer sector are increasingly pushing into industrial production to realize applications to support workers. Especially, smart glasses are currently in the focus and discussed regarding their application scenarios and potential benefits. Nevertheless, most of the available applications are considered to be concept studies or dem...

Manual work is a cornerstone of manufacturing. This holds true today, as well as for future factories of the Industry 4.0 era. Use cases of manual work are small series or highly customized products. Assistance systems that support workers in dealing with such diverse assembly processes are developed and evaluated. This paper presents an evaluation...

This paper presents an architecture for a system that assists workers in manual tasks. The system integrates different assistance modalities applicable for assembly and maintenance. It supports several operational environments and assists the worker by providing instructions for sequential processes. The system is not limited to specific assistance...

Im Mittelpunkt der 8. Fachtagung USEWARE 2016 steht der Mensch im Industrie-4.0- Zeitalter. Intelligente Komponenten kommunizieren schon heute eigenständig über eingebettete Mobilfunk und Internettechnologien mit der Produktionsanlage und veranlassen bei Bedarf eine Reparatur durch den Menschen. Das Potential der Digitalisierung in der Industrie st...

Videos are an intuitive and maintainable way to document and transfer knowledge. Smart glasses allow to record videos hands-free from the ego-perspective with little effort. This makes them suitable devices for documenting maintenance procedures in industrial environments. Within the project AmbiWise mobile collaboration systems are developed to ma...

Exchange and documentation of knowledge is vital in the industrial environment. The access to knowledge of colleagues can be essential for fulfilling several tasks. Just as well, workers can make experiences that are valuable for others. Within the project AmbiWise a collaboration system including adaptive and multimodal user interfaces for mobile...

This project evaluated whether hierarchical gestures are a usable interaction technique. Hierarchical gestures are constructed by chaining primitives, for instance Call and Frieder, to the command Call Frieder. These primitives are assigned with gestures. A command is invoked by a concatenation of the gestures that are assigned to the primitives th...

This paper describes the Thumbs Up! Twente system, a natural language generation system designed for the GIVE 2.5 Challenge. The purpose of the system is to guide a user through a virtual D environment by generating instructions in real-time. Our system focuses on motivating the user to keep him playing the game and trying to find the trophy.