Many industries today are struggling with early identification of quality issues, given the shortening of product design cycles and the desire to decrease production costs, coupled with customers' requirement for high uptime. The vehicle industry is no exception, as breakdowns often lead to on-road stops and delays in delivery missions. In this paper we consider quality issues to be an unexpected increase in failure rates of a particular component; those are particularly problematic for the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) since they lead to unplanned costs and can significantly affect brand value. We propose a new approach towards the early detection of quality issues using Machine Learning (ML) to forecast the failures of a given component across the large population of units.

In this study, we combine the usage information of vehicles with the records of their failures. The former is continuously collected, as the usage statistics are transmitted over telematics connections. The latter is based on invoice and warranty information collected in the workshops. We compare two different ML approaches: the first is an auto-regression model of the failure ratios for vehicles based on past information, while the second is the aggregation of individual vehicle failure predictions based on their individual usage.

We present experimental evaluations on the real data captured from heavy-duty trucks demonstrating how these two formulations have complementary strengths and weaknesses; in particular, they can outperform each other given different volumes of the data. The classification approach surpasses the regressor model whenever enough data is available, i.e., once the vehicles are in-service for a longer time. On the other hand, the regression shows better predictive performance with a smaller amount of data, i.e., for vehicles that have been deployed recently.  © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Socially assistive robots could contribute to fulfilling an important need for interaction in contexts where human caregivers are scarce–such as art therapy, where peers, or patients and therapists, can make art together. However, current art-making robots typically generate art either by themselves, or as tools under the control of a human artist; how to make art together with a human in a good way has not yet received much attention, possibly because some concepts related to art, such as emotion and creativity, are not yet well understood. The current work reports on our use of a collaborative prototyping approach to explore this concept of a robot which can paint together with people. The result is a proposed design, based on an idea of using visual metaphors to convey contingency and artistry. Our aim is that the identified considerations will help support next steps, toward supporting positive experiences for people through art-making with a robot.

Predicting future maintenance needs of equipment can be addressed in a variety of ways. Methods based on machine learning approaches provide an interesting platform for mining large data sets to find patterns that might correlate with a given fault. In this paper, we approach predictive maintenance as a classification problem and use Random Forest to separate data readouts within a particular time window into those corresponding to faulty and non-faulty component categories. We utilize diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs) as an example of event-based data, and propose four categories of features that can be derived from DTCs as a predictive maintenance framework. We test the approach using large-scale data from a fleet of heavy duty trucks, and show that DTCs can be used within our framework as indicators of imminent failures in different components.