AXTech (Norway)

This paper presents an artificial intelligence (AI) based edge processing real-time maintenance system for the purposes of industrial manufacturing control and diagnostics. The system is evaluated in a soybean processing manufacturing facility to identify abnormalities and possible breakdown situations, prevent damage, reduce maintenance costs, and increase production productivity. The system can be used in any other manufacturing or chemical processing facility that make use of motors rotating equipment in different process phases. The system combines condition monitoring, fault detection, and diagnosis using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms. These algorithms are used with data resulting from the continuous monitoring of relevant production equipment and motor parameters, such as temperature, vibration, sound/noise, and current/voltage. The condition monitoring integrates intelligent Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices with multiple sensors combined with AI-based techniques and edge processing. This is done to identify the parameter modifications and distinctive patterns that occur before a failure and predict forthcoming failure modes before they arise. The data from production equipment/motors is collected wirelessly using different communication protocols - such as Bluetooth low energy (BLE), Long range wide area network (LoRaWAN), and Wi-Fi - and aggregated into an edge computing processing unit via several gateways. The AI-based algorithms are embedded in the processing unit at the edge, allowing the prediction and intelligent control of the production equipment/motor parameters. IIoT devices for environmental sensing, vibration, temperature monitoring, and sound/ultrasound detection are used with embedded signal processing that runs on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. These devices are connected through either wired or wireless protocols. The system described addresses the components necessary for implementing the predictive maintenance (PdM) strategy in soybean industrial processing manufacturing environments. Additionally, it includes new elements that broaden the possibilities for prescriptive maintenance (PsM) developments to be made. The type of ML or DL techniques and algorithms used in maintenance modeling is dictated by the application and available data. The approach presented combines multiple data sources that improve the accuracy of condition monitoring and prediction. DL methods further increase the accuracy and require interpretable and efficient methods as well as the availability of significant amounts of (labeled) data.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) have developed rapidly in the past few years, as both the Internet and “things” have evolved significantly. “Things” now range from simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices to smart wireless sensors, intelligent wireless sensors and actuators, robotic things, and autonomous vehicles operating in consumer, business, and industrial environments. The emergence of “intelligent things” (static or mobile) in collaborative autonomous fleets requires new architectures, connectivity paradigms, trustworthiness frameworks, and platforms for the integration of applications across different business and industrial domains. These new applications accelerate the development of autonomous system design paradigms and the proliferation of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT). In IoRT, collaborative robotic things can communicate with other things, learn autonomously, interact safely with the environment, humans and other things, and gain qualities like self-maintenance, self-awareness, self-healing, and fail-operational behavior. IoRT applications can make use of the individual, collaborative, and collective intelligence of robotic things, as well as information from the infrastructure and operating context to plan, implement and accomplish tasks under different environmental conditions and uncertainties. The continuous, real-time interaction with the environment makes perception, location, communication, cognition, computation, connectivity, propulsion, and integration of federated IoRT and digital platforms important components of new-generation IoRT applications. This paper reviews the taxonomy of the IoRT, emphasizing the IoRT intelligent connectivity, architectures, interoperability, and trustworthiness framework, and surveys the technologies that enable the application of the IoRT across different domains to perform missions more efficiently, productively, and completely. The aim is to provide a novel perspective on the IoRT that involves communication among robotic things and humans and highlights the convergence of several technologies and interactions between different taxonomies used in the literature.