Voice User Interface based control for Industrial machine tools

To meet productivity goals, machining operations require high levels of efficiency to achieve the desired manufacturing quality in the available time. Additionally, machine tools can lead to safety-critical scenarios due to the high process dynamics and hazardous forces and torques. Therefore, workers need to exhibit special care while interacting with certain kinds of machines. Operational safety can be increased by eradicating the dependence on tangible control of machine tools. Current developments in Artificial Intelligence, especially in natural language processing, lead to increased utilization of speech-based interaction between humans and machines. However, these developments are mainly limited to areas of consumer electronics. Nevertheless, this type of human-machine interaction offers great potential for machining operations. Artificial neural network architectures like Transformer have rapidly emerged as the dominant architecture for natural language processing, overtaking alternative neural architectures such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks in performance for natural language understanding and natural language generation tasks. The architecture scales with training data and model size, enables efficient parallel training, and captures wide-ranging sequence features. These advancements can be used for enhancing the ease of use and safety of machine tools, which are often safety critical. In this article, a Voice-User-Interface based control of machine tools is conceptually outlined. Such a control can increase the efficiency of the workers, as it eradicates the need of hand usage. It further increases the safety of workers operating the machines and can detect anomalous sounds corresponding to machine failures during the machining process. The voice is first passed through a speech-to-text pipeline for converting the speech signals to relevant text, the text output is mapped to machine commands and passed to the physical machine. The implementation of the setup guarantees the speech-based control – even for safety-critical tasks -of machine tools. Moreover, this paper outlines the benefits and challenges of the developed VUI architecture.