
Deep Learning AI Listens to Machines for Signs of Trouble - jonbaer
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/deep-learning-ai-listens-to-machines-for-signs-of-trouble
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mswen
I did a market research project for Honeywell back around 1997 on the use of
predictive maintenance for industrial and office tower HVAC systems. I was
tasked with doing focus groups and interviews with persons in charge of
factories and office tower facility managers to understand the economic impact
of HVAC downtime. Even at that time some factories that went out of spec on
temperature and humidity could cause production lines to be shut down and each
hour of downtime cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity
and costs in shutting down and restarting process manufacturing equipment.

The connection to this story is that one of the techniques they had developed
was vibration and audio analysis of large electric motors and other equipment
I believe to determine when a motor or part was starting to go out of spec.

I sometimes wonder about systematically mining R&D ideas that where leading
edge but discarded as too expensive or impractical for one reason or another
from 15 to 20 years ago.

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apathy
re: your last line:

That is the classic industrial ML advice, isn't it? Read a bunch of papers,
look at the stupid obsolete method they all compare against, implement the
latter.

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dbcurtis
Ha ha!! They have reinvented the Iowa farm boy!

Only slightly kidding. I learned at a young age the sounds of unhappy
machines. This skill has served me well in my engineering career. The
"townies" with degrees from fancier schools than mine are often much slower on
reaching for e-stop.

This project has huge economic value. Done right it is a game changer.

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electromagnetic
My dad was gifted with cars, and got into programming with fuel injectors back
in the day. He worked as a diagnostic mechanic for a lot of years with lots of
funny stories (like roping himself to a car roof with the hood taken off), but
he'll sit in your car and tell you a wheel bearing is going. Jump him around
the seats and he'll isolate it for you, and even today he gets it on the
margin before a dealerships mechanic would be able to spot it.

IIRC a 747 produces 30TB of data per hour from its engine monitoring.

It won't be long until it's in all cars, and then in expensive appliances. A
washing machine that detects an unbalanced load to save the motor?

It definitely is a game changer, and I don't think we'll fully comprehend the
economic value. Say a stove that can detect a pizza box smoldering on it and
cut its own power. What's the economic value of saving a house from burning
down? From saving a washing machine from self destructing, or a front loader
from flooding your house because a flow monitor says it put more water in than
should have triggered the float valve, etc.

It's not just industrial that will benefit, it'll be everything we put moving
parts in.

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DougN7
That would be wonderful and I hope you're right. However, most manufacturer
don't benefit if you but a new washing machine every 30 years instead of every
10.

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sumoboy
Unless it's a Samsung where lifetime < 5 years and self destructs.

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sitkack
In 2000/2001 I had an office next to a couple guys that were doing failure
prediction on electric motors using signal analysis of accelerometers.

The next big leap is the integration of cheap wireless force sensors in
objects themselves. This will provide realtime design feedback in the field,
so not just early detection of failures but root cause analysis of the design
flaws themselves.

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metaphor
> The next big leap is the integration of cheap wireless force sensors in
> objects themselves. This will provide realtime design feedback in the field,
> so not just early detection of failures but root cause analysis of the
> design flaws themselves.

I'm aware of at least one team working towards a similar goal[1]...although
_cost effective_ (as opposed to _cheap_ ) may be more appropriate to describe
it.

[1]
[http://www.secnav.navy.mil/innovation/Documents/2016/05/SEAM...](http://www.secnav.navy.mil/innovation/Documents/2016/05/SEAMTeam.pdf)

~~~
sitkack
Cool.

Yeah, I have been thinking of ways to build passive circuits into structures
so they can be actively scanned by light, rf, etc. Modulate the return pulse
based on the value being measured. Measuring internal forces on a parts of a
crankshaft, piston connection rod, fan blade, etc would be amazing. Could
actively derate a machine based on internal part fatigue. Now if we could have
internal sensors using TDR we could spot cracks as they form.

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donclark
If they could port this technology to an app on the phone, could they grow its
understanding of various machines pretty rapidly?

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deepnotderp
Care to elaborate what you mean?

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apathy
I would literally pay to subscribe to a comments feed on posts like this. It's
so obvious and so powerful, I'm sitting here kicking myself for not thinking
of it first.

Nearly every time I've put in a successful patent, that last bit ("god damn
it! Why didn't I think of that?") comes up. The other times are derived from
clinical trials in rare populations (whereupon other trialists say "god damn
it! Why didn't I think of measuring that?").

The idea being, look for simple ideas like this, jump into the market second,
and split the market for a while. Then when it gets too crowded, jump to the
next-best-idea in the queue. Could be very profitable in this big ML
transition.

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xapata
This idea is decades old.

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apathy
I don't doubt it, but the same could be said of ML in general. Being in the
right place at the right time counts for a lot.

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xapata
I'm not sure how that follows. Folks have been using statistical machine
learning techniques to analyze machine sounds for at least a decade in my
experience, and probably since the 80s according to other comments here.
Therefore, if you subscribed to a newsletter of articles like this one and
tried to launch competitor companies, you wouldn't be second to market, but
yet another in a crowded field.

~~~
apathy
Possibly. I was thinking along the lines of "look at idea, see if easily,
reliably, and cheaply implemented, assess market & competition, decide
accordingly".

Hell, even that could probably be automated. Hmm. ;-)

~~~
xapata
I think the Samwer brothers have some experience with the second-to-market
process.

~~~
apathy
Looks like they did OK...

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monksy
Isn't this what Uptake has been doing for years?

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pboutros
I might be wrong, but Uptake seems to focus on cleaning and analyzing data
from existing sensors on heavy machinery, whereas the firm in the article
installs their own sensors (perhaps in addition to that).

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sunebeck
Would be nice to implement for hard drives to catch them failing before they
do!

