A natural language voice solution for industrial maintenance

Date 07-03-2022 Tekniker

Teaching staff and students from the IMH Campus on Digital and Advanced Manufacturing come to Tekniker’s facilties to evaluate a number of problems/situations related to robot maintenance focused on using interactive natural language voice solutions.

In order to facilitate and improve the productivity of certain industrial processes, the consortium comprising Vicomtech, UPV/EHU, Ikor, IMH, UZEI and Tekniker, is currently developing and implementing interaction mechanisms between operators and machines to make further progress with regard to establishing an interaction with industrial machines based on using natural language.

Consequently, and within the framework of the so-called EKIN project, Vicomtech, UPV/EHU and Tekniker have developed a conversational assistant that provides interactive access to information available in technical manuals by combining advanced Question Answering techniques and Dialogue Systems.

More specifically, Tekniker has developed one of the components of this assistant in the form of a natural dialogue system based on semantic technologies and procedures described in technical manuals that will allow operators to carry out procedural tasks and information searches. One of its key activities is focused on compiling and labelling technical manuals.

In order to validate and evaluate EKIN’s quality and degree of usability in maintenance environments, teachers and students from the IMH campus on Digital and Advanced Manufacturing visited Tekniker’s facilities to make an overall assessment of problems/situations related to robot maintenance.

Robots are associated with information published in manuals so that when they interact with EKIN’s natural assistant their aim is to obtain all the information that is required to solve problems although without performing conventional information searches in manuals.

In this particular case, users, teachers and students, interacted via natural voice language and the assistant displayed all the relevant information on-screen.

Thanks to this experimentation, it has been possible to evaluate one of the main results that the EKIN project was expected to deliver: an assistive solution for maintenance procedures based on technical manuals.

To learn more about the EKIN project, please click here.