We hear a lot about how the Internet of Things will enable predictive maintenance to occur in mechanical settings. Famously, GE is accumulating masses of data from its jet engines, and crunching all of that data to give them better insights into what maintenance should occur, and when it should occur.
But building this sort of sensing technology into existing machinery is far harder than making it part of the design process for new kit, and this problem space, that of delivering these insights across all machinery, is exactly what Augury was set up to do.
Augury’s aim is to bring predictive maintenance technology to new markets. The technology combines two key shifts in the industry: artificial intelligence and the Industrial Internet of Things. Put these two things together and you hopefully have mechanical machines with the ability to monitor their own health and well-being.
Shining the Halo
Augury is today announcing Halo, a continuous diagnostic platform for industrial and commercial facilities. This cloud-based diagnostics solution monitors mechanical equipment and predicts failures before they happen. While only launching today, Augury Halo is already deployed at several Fortune 500 companies.
In terms of the all-important details of what it is and how it works, the mechanical and sensing aspects are fairly logical. Augury Halo uses vibration, ultrasound and other types of sensing technologies to detect equipment malfunctions and provide recommendations for maintaining the health status of any machine. The algorithms use all the collected data from a variety of different machines to build a model of how malfunctioning equipment behaves. To date, Halo has collected data from over 40,000 machines and has therefore built up a significant “dictionary” of malfunction scenarios.
Automating the predictive maintenance process
The key to build uptake in industrial IoT settings is to have platforms that can run, without much intervention from human beings. Augury has thought about this requirement and comes to it from a perspective of continuous, largely hands-off, diagnosis. The platform requires minimal training for usage and facility operation teams benefit from:
- Always on and always listening smart sensors constantly collecting and analyzing data of critical assets.
- Machine learning algorithms that process the data sent via cellular or Wi-Fi connection to Augury’s secure cloud, providing powerful insights into machine health.
- Instant alerts and reports sent in the event a malfunction is detected.
- Reports providing an in-depth view of machine health, developing issues, and suggested maintenance practices.
Saar Yoskovitz, CEO of Augury speaks to the way IoT has impacted on industrial expectations:
The Industrial IoT is changing the way the industry makes informed decisions based on real-time data. Halo shortens the time to action – from the earliest signs of malfunction to remediation.
MyPOV
Proof of the pudding is in the eating. The idea of easily deployed and largely autonomous IIoT solutions is an alluring one. But that promise only becomes reality when the platforms are sufficiently broad to be deployed across a huge array of different industrial machines. Time will tell just how generic the use-cases and, by extension, the applicability of Halo, will be. I’ll be watching with interest.
