Real-Time Fault Detection and Condition Monitoring for Industrial Autonomous Transfer Vehicles Utilizing Edge Artificial Intelligence

Early fault detection and real-time condition monitoring systems have become quite significant for today's modern industrial systems. In a high volume of manufacturing facilities, fleets of equipment are expected to operate uninterrupted for days or weeks. Any unplanned interruptions to equipment uptime could jeopardize manufacturers' cycle time, capacity, and, most significantly, credibility for their customers. With the help of smart manufacturing technologies, companies have started to develop and integrate fault detection and classification systems where end-to-end constant monitoring of equipment is facilitated, and smart algorithms are adapted for the early generation of fault alarms and classification. This paper proposes a generic real-time fault diagnosis and condition monitoring system utilizing edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) and a data distributor open source middleware platform called FIWARE. The implemented system architecture is flexible and includes interfaces that can be easily expanded for various devices. This work demonstrates it for condition monitoring of autonomous transfer vehicle (ATV) equipment targeting a smart factory use case. The system is verified in a designated industrial model environment in a lab with a single ATV operation. The anomaly conditions of the ATV are diagnosed by a deep learning-based fault diagnosis method performed in the Edge AI unit, and the results are transferred to the data storage via a data pipeline setup. The proposed system's Edge AI solution for the ATV use case provides significant real-time performance. The network bandwidth requirement and total elapsed data transfer time have been reduced by 43 and 37 times, respectively. The proposed system successfully enables real-time monitoring of ATV fault conditions and expands to a fleet of equipment in a real manufacturing facility.