Towards Effective Industrial Robot Fleet Visualization for Remote Service Applications

In recent years, advances in sensors, Internet and communication technologies opened many promising opportunities for remote services of industrial robots. With remote service applications, potential problems in robot systems can be detected before they happen, and prevented pro-actively avoiding costly production shut-downs. However, to be able to effectively perform remote service operations, remote support engineers need to analyse vast amounts of information. For a remote support engineer to be able to manage such amount of data, effective data visualization is crucial. Based on field studies and collected needs of support engineers working with industrial robots, we have designed and developed a prototype, i.e. one possible solution of an effective industrial fleet visualization, applied on the overheated robots use case. The initial validation of the prototype showed the benefits of such visual data presentation, as well as future directions.