How far away is ARTIFICIAL intelligence?
The question is not difficult to answer. The first thing many people do when they wake up is ask Xiao Du about the weather. On the way to work to see the information, can not be separated from thousands of faces recommendation algorithm; If you live in a first-tier city, there is a chance to experience self-driving taxis…
From this perspective, artificial intelligence has penetrated into the details of production and life, and finally reached the critical point of large-scale landing under the fourth wave. However, this is only a perspective to examine the process of artificial intelligence industry, just like in the field of construction machinery, known as the barometer of national economy, ARTIFICIAL intelligence is still outside the main theme of the market, which is an experimental topic without a sense of existence.
It is under this background that Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Sany Heavy Machinery have made a beneficial attempt to explain the feasibility of the transformation of construction machinery to intelligence.
01 New answers to old questions
As a core member of Sany Group, SANY Heavy Machinery is a construction machinery manufacturer integrating research and development, production and sales. At present, sANY heavy Machinery ranks first in China in the fields of concrete machinery, piling machinery and crawler crane, among which the sales volume of excavator occupies 15% of the global market share in 2020.
Different from many industries, the market competitiveness of construction machinery is not only reflected in research and development, production links, after-sales maintenance services have a considerable proportion. After all, construction machinery is an important means of production and a means of production for customers to make a living. To a large extent, it is irreplaceable. Once the machine breaks down, it means that it is forced to stop work, which may cause serious economic losses to customers and even affect the progress of the whole project.
Customer first, Sany has created a service standard of “solution in a Day”, which means that no matter how remote a customer’s construction site is, sany service engineers will arrive at the site within a day. However, such work is very dependent on the personal experience of service engineers. As many as 50% of the problems cannot be diagnosed accurately, service experts of SANY need to go to the site in person, which will not only delay the customers’ start time, but also face huge manpower and capital investment of SANY.
In order to further enhance the efficiency of the service, trinity juki services try to use Internet tools to solve the problem, such as service engineer at the scene cannot cope with the problem, you can contact through text, images, video and other forms the backend services experts, remote collaborative manner to reduce the frequency of experts to the scene. However, due to the high complexity of construction machinery and equipment, traditional telephone or wechat communication is difficult to describe the exact problem, especially in the scene that requires multi-person cooperation, the efficiency of the service is not improved, so that after a period of time, experts are still needed to solve the problem.
In April 2020, the service department of Sany sought out Baidu Intelligent Cloud. At that time, 5G has been gradually implemented in large and small cities in China, and the basic barriers of data transmission have been removed. Can we build a remote intelligent expert system to break the space restrictions of field service engineers and back-end experts?
After a year of research and development, debugging, after verification, the trinity juki officially launched in April 2021 industrial AR remote assistance system: after service engineer arrived at the scene, can be backward side experts by single or many hd audio and video calls, experts can use a space stereo labeling techniques to draw lines, arrows, or marked with the order form, help service engineers in the correct , and can transmit pictures, PDF, 3D drawings and other documents in real time.
The old problem finally has a new answer. At present, the industrial AR remote assistance system has been applied to the maintenance service of pile drivers, loaders and excavators. The monthly work order volume has exceeded 4000, in addition to the problems that need to be returned to the factory for maintenance, can be properly solved through the remote system.
Intelligent imagination space
Perhaps in the context of the consumer Internet, the application scenarios of remote collaboration are not new. In the cutting-edge fields such as medical care and education, products such as remote diagnosis and treatment and online interaction have been quite mature, but there are multiple challenges in the construction machinery industry that cannot be underestimated.
As a direct example, most construction machinery construction sites are in the wild and other remote areas, which do not have stable network transmission like urban households. In order to ensure stable and efficient service under harsh environment. , Baidu intelligent cloud plays an indispensable role.
Perhaps not technically complex, but from the standpoint of a front-line service engineer, there is no doubt that the two solutions have a qualitative change.
Traditional maintenance service plan has a depth on human dependence, that often can see such a scene: trinity juki engineers after received customer’s call, he put down his work on the rushed to the scene, and often need to be in hot summer or cold winter days into the narrow space treatment failure, after four or five hours of continuous fighting, are all from head to foot Saturated with hydraulic oil.
And the new solution to get rid of the limitations of long distance collaboration, let service engineers feel intelligent scene: after arrived at the scene is in no hurry to drilling equipment troubleshooting, back-end experts first description of the fault, the right solution for science, even the experts in the form of the first view real-time guidance, both reduce the uncertainty of fault handling, also reduced the engineers Intensity of work.
Zhong Youfu, director of service Department of Sany, has a deep feeling about this: “After the launch of industrial AR remote assistance system, our experts can make real-time analysis and decision, find out the problem and solve the problem. Not only is the customer experience getting better and the service engineer’s work no longer so hard, but we also have a cost reduction and efficiency effect on ourselves, saving the business cost of experts to and from the business, and significantly improve the service efficiency.”
Zhong Youfu also said in an interview at the same time, the current and cooperation is only the first phase of baidu cloud, the follow-up and the second stage and third stage, the trinity juki will have all of the audio and video data stored in the cloud, and proceed to data management work, plan to annotation of unstructured data such as audio and video, further use the data to the gold, will experience precipitation for further Knowledge.
“Now is popular on the Internet, the concept of brain, trinity juki are doing now is to build a diagnosis of brain in the field of engineering machinery, it is difficult, takes about two or three years time, need to baidu such understand business, understand the product and understand the AI enterprises to participate in together, together do something benefit industry and society.” Zhong Youfu in the interview described the construction machinery to intelligent imagination space.
To use Armstrong’s words, remote assistance is a small step for Sany to optimize its maintenance process, but a big step towards intelligent construction machinery.
03 The “liberation” of an industry
From the exploration of digitization to the imagination of intelligence, the attempt of Sany Heavy Machinery and Baidu Intelligent Cloud reveals the evolution direction of the construction machinery industry: the process of digitization is also the process of transforming experience into knowledge. When the knowledge graph and knowledge base are constructed, it will bring the liberation of the whole industry.
This conjecture is not deliberately exaggerated. As early as around 2007, Sany Tried to replace manual labor with welding robots. After a year of testing and adjustment, it was found that the stability of robotic welding products was far better than manual labor. Not only did the service life of excavators quadruple, but after-sales problems also decreased by three quarters. In 2011, Sany won the first sales title in the excavator market of Heavy Industries, and in 2020, sany excavator won the global sales title.
Sany heavy Machinery in the after-sales service link of intelligent attempt, and will produce what kind of chemical reaction? At least two possible directions can be seen.
One is the proliferation of application scenarios. In addition to pile-drivers, excavators, loaders and other products, it can also be gradually copied to other construction machinery and equipment, and even copied by friends, gradually forming a after-sales maintenance service paradigm, accelerating the standardization of the whole industry.
And potential floor space more after-sales service, once appeared in view of the engineering machinery diagnosis, brain can connect all link in upstream and downstream, such as the construction process of safety supervision, the safety of the operation process diagnosis, common problems of large data analysis, etc., can be upward feedback directional research, engineering machinery products can also control the downstream construction process, further down Low construction process accident rate.
Second, the lowering of the threshold for talents. Service engineers play an indispensable role in the whole maintenance link, but the selection criteria of service engineers are quite harsh, they need to have the spirit of hard work, the sense of service for the sake of customers, and excellent personal ability.
With the demographic dividend gradually fading and young people born after 1995 “fleeing” to the tertiary industry, it has long been an indisputable fact that there is a shortage of service engineers. And intelligent just walked out of the dilemma is to help the industry perspective: smart brain value lies in the experience and knowledge reuse, if take a photo or video can find fault source of engineering machinery, there is no doubt that can reduce the strict requirements of service engineers personal ability, will also be changed to a great extent the young original impression of “service engineer” industry, osmosis affect the young People’s view of choosing jobs.
If it is further extended, China is at an important node of industrial upgrading and industrial agglomeration, and construction machinery is exactly the hub of industrial transformation, itself is a portrayal of China’s industrial layout and depth, and to a large extent determines China’s place in the new round of industrial revolution.
Considering the huge dividends released by the transformation of high-speed rail, communication, Internet and other industries, the data collection, processing, analysis and value mining of construction machinery have undoubtedly guided and reconstructed the process of the industrial revolution.
04 epilogue
Looking back at the cooperation between Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Sany Heavy Machinery, the seemingly insignificant intelligent case hides the inevitable trend of the construction machinery industry.
To borrow the opinion of Zhong Youfu, director of Sany’s Service Department: Innovation is the key for an enterprise to remain competitive. Our attempt with Baidu Intelligent Cloud has been proved to save a lot of resources and has rich application space. Sany will continue to iterate in this field, and use more technological innovation to add value to customers, empower agents, and reduce the labor intensity and complexity of service engineers.
It can be foreseen that the industrial AR remote assistance system, after the training of SANY, is bound to penetrate into more and more scenes such as wind power, automobiles and factories.
Baidu AI developer community ai.baidu.com/forum provides a platform for developers from all over the country to communicate, share and answer questions, so that developers will no longer “fight alone” on the road of research and development, and find better technical solutions through continuous communication and discussion. If you want to try all kinds of ARTIFICIAL intelligence technologies and develop application scenarios, please join baidu AI community. All your imagination about AI can be realized here!
Scan the qr code below, add the little assistant wechat “JINGdong card, xiaofu customized peripheral, mysterious gift box, suitcase” and more benefits for you to get ~
