AI VR/AR

Audit Holosen 4.0: Intelligent auditing using mixed reality

In addition to requiring periodic maintenance and revision to ensure their optimal operation, energy distribution or generation infrastructures are usually located quite far away from important urban centers. For this reason, it is usually necessary to send specialized personnel to perform on-site evaluations, with the additional factor that these operations involve a high risk when working with high voltage.

In addition, many of the systems currently used for these inspections are not very well developed, since the most advanced ones perform a simple verification through geopositioned photos uploaded by an operator.

Industry
Energy Research
Services
VR/AR
Technology
Hololens 2, Computer Vision, sensorization
Audit Holosen 4.0 is a project carried out together with onTech Innovation, the University of Seville, and the Cuerva Group, to provide Spanish SMEs in the electricity sector with an assistance tool to perform intelligent audits to accelerate the digitization and modernization of their critical infrastructures toward the new paradigm of Industry 4.0.
01

Challenges

Today, there are centralized and remotely connected control systems that provide effective and regular overall monitoring and control. However, human intervention continues to play an important role, preventing, among other things, hacks that take control of the infrastructure due to these physical control points that act as firewalls.

Therefore, the energy sector needed an intelligent audit assistance tool that would facilitate the control of the execution of maintenance and technical inspection tasks using new mixed reality and sensorization technologies.

02

Results

We have used HoloLens 2 to perform operations in the technical environment, using virtual elements projected on these mixed reality glasses to visualize important information and interact with it. In addition, using AI and computer vision techniques, we added the possibility of interpreting elements of the environment and detecting whether certain operations have been performed correctly, validating them, and minimizing human error in complex situations and maintenance with risk.

Finally, the sensory part has been developed, where wearable sensors have been applied in order to take into consideration factors such as stress level and to alert of its potential incidence.

03

Highlights

The energy sector needs to modernize and introduce techniques that allow them to be effective and protect their employees. The combination of mixed reality, AI and sensorization will allow operators to enjoy a world of new possibilities such as tele-assistance, access to a layer of visual information to help with reality, acting on elements that are not physically present thanks to projected holograms, consulting the state of the infrastructure in real time, stress control, olfactory control, among others.

The project responds to the change of working method in the way inspections and maintenance are carried out in critical infrastructures, achieving great advantages such as problem solving to verify the status of operations, new ways of interaction with the virtual world, detection and prediction of error causes, data reading, access to a layer of visual information, increased reliability and cost savings, reduction of accident rates, etc.

logo de proyecto financiado por la unión europea
logo del plan de recuperación transformación y resiliencia
  • Full project title: Intelligent auditing in electrical maintenance and inspection using new methods of mixed reality and sensorization.
  • Project file code: AEI-010500-2021b-31
  • Project funding agencies: Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Trade of the Government of Spain, AEI Cluster, Next Generation Program of the European Union, and Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan.

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