Novel assistance systems for intelligent production

Industry 4.0 is increasingly becoming the collective term for the new wave of digitisation, which is revolutionising the production of tangible goods in particular and has an enormous impact on the competitive position of companies.

The Research Studio iSPACE is working successfully with leading Austrian industrial, commercial and research companies in the ASSIST 4.0 project to develop context-based assistance systems for intelligent production at the interfaces between man, machine and data.

Every minute counts in the event of an incident. Instead of long and laborious searches in manuals for solutions or browsing through documentation archives, ASSIST 4.0 provides the right information at the right time in the right place and in tested quality. iSPACE is developing a new positioning strategy for indoor use, which will complement the positioning solutions (ultrasound, barcodes, etc.) that have been widely used up to now with the latest generation of cost-efficient Bluetooth low energy modules, so that, for example, maintenance orders can be better processed with COTS smart devices in a context-based manner. The content will be prepared compactly and tailored to the respective mobile device and offered in multimedia form with texts, images or videos. Instructions for the proposed problem solution are presented step-by-step.

iSPACE on INFRASAFETY studio manager Dr. Manfred Mittlböck and project manager Dr. Bernhard Vockner explain the procedure: “The recommender system developed by us is also important for the users, so that only those maintenance documents are suggested to the users that they need on the device on site, tailored to the work order. Our innovation for this lies in the combination of semantic linking of the documentation used in combination with the outline contexts position and time. The results are provided for the Assist Web-Client according to the positioning”. For the suggestion ranking of the results, we also rely on the RSA FG Open Source Software EasyRec.

Up to now, there is no service concept worldwide that is realized so comprehensively that it could meet the complex requirements of intelligent assistance systems. So far available solutions focus strongly on partial aspects, such as the acquisition of machine data and the prognosis or development of data glasses, but without industry-compatible interaction concepts. The core aspect is thus the integration, coordination and scaling of solutions and innovation approaches into results that are acceptable to users and companies.

The aim of the research and development work in OMG3D-Maps is, in cooperation with the company Ocean Maps GmbH, to develop methods for a cost-effective extraction, integration and presentation of underwater worlds and in high-resolution 3D underwater maps for B2B customers and divers. By automating the process of creating 3D underwater maps, taking into account additional sensors, bottom structure mapping, data validation and merging, reproducible results can be achieved in several levels of detail, allowing for cost-effective map creation.