Anyone using AI in manufacturing? How are you using it in your job?

25

u/mccorml11 1d ago

Feed it machine manuals and have it answer questions or direct me to sections for problems I’m encountering or I have it generate example code. Basically use it for bouncing ideas off of.

7

u/Liizam 1d ago

Man what do you use? This never works for my stuff

8

u/mccorml11 1d ago

My company has whatever the paid chat gpt version is. There’s a gpt for data analysis that takes pdfs and then occasionally you have to tell chat gpt not to make things up just to have an answer

5

u/Liizam 1d ago

I’ve tired the paid version and fed it technical pdfs, made gpt and everything. It’s always saying bs. What version did you try this with? Maybe it’s better now

1

u/mccorml11 17h ago

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-HMNcP6w7d-data-analyst

I think this is the one I use. I don’t have access to my work account from home so I can’t tell for sure but it looks like it.

3

u/baconburns 1d ago

This works really well with Google's Notebook LM. Its sole purpose is to have different environments where you feed it specific documents to be used as the knowledgebase for all inquiries.

1

u/Aggressive_Ad_507 11h ago

Interesting, how many sources does it cite per query? I tried something similar with another program a year ago and it only returned one source per query. Not very useful.

2

u/LabCertain1304 2h ago

I've done this with something from Google called NotebookLM -- it's really not perfect, but what I like about it is that it cites its sources so it provides links to whatever docs I throw into it.

Citation alone has helped me trawl through manuals to get me to the ballpark of what I'm looking for

1

u/Liizam 1h ago

Oh not bad idea

3

u/passivevigilante 1d ago

How do you do it

3

u/delta_2k 1d ago

You can use chatgpt and put all the files in a project folder or you can use Google notebook lm and upload up to 50 files.

There’s lots of other ways but these are two to get started.

5

u/sherkon_18 1d ago

Quality inspection using cameras and AI with ability to reject bad product.

Watching control over area for pedestrians for MOPED safety using cameras and AI.

3

u/spaceman60 Machine Vision Engineer 1d ago

I assume a function specific neural network rather than an LLM, correct? Which package are you using for vision?

2

u/sherkon_18 1d ago edited 1d ago

In house trained model for quality inspection use case and control over area is off the shelf model for human detection.

OpenCV for image and video processing and ONNX env and python for inference. Running on prem using k8s, nvidia gpu.

1

u/bullseye93 1d ago

This is pretty cool. What kind of manufacturing are you in?

What cameras did you use?

Were you able to do it yourself, or was it more like a company driven project with specialist vendors?

Can you please explain more?

3

u/sherkon_18 1d ago

Continues and discrete paper and pulp. Packaging, etc.

Cameras, depends. Security type such as Axis. Inspections it’s an off the shelf gigE type for HD high speed. Lighting is very important here.

It’s all in house by our data scientists and dev teams.

Can’t explain too many details tho.

1

u/mayodoctur 14h ago

I'm working with an ågency that is trying to provide this type of solution to automotive manufacturing agencies. Did you guys already have in house data scientists or did you hire them for this work ?

I mean what im trying to understand is, is there a gap for agencies to come in with this type of specialist skills. Not for yourself but for the general industry.

1

u/theseptictank 6h ago

I would guess this wouldn't fly if you're ISO certified?

1

u/sherkon_18 5h ago

Which part? Quality inspection for QMS cert?

Or MOPED for OH&S cert?

Most of these systems sit on top of our existing systems as a subsystem.

For example, quality inspection using cameras still integrates with the PLC and the PLC interacts with the controls. Our AI “influencers” controls.

Human detection sits on top of our MOPED safety system as an additional precaution.

Hope that helps.

1

u/LabCertain1304 2h ago

Quality inspection is my specialty -- computer vision for quality inspection is lightyears ahead of everything else in the deployed AI space, and there's still a ton of room to grow.

Solid camera availability has become a lot easier, and access to computing inside of facilities is also a lot easier than ~10 years ago, but the issue is in more what Systems Integrator/internal team supports the cameras for things like calibration issues/fairly standard software problems like there's a pretty crappy UI so the ops team who has to use the product hates it

1

u/LabCertain1304 2h ago

Quality inspection is my specialty -- computer vision for quality inspection is lightyears ahead of everything else in the deployed AI space, and there's still a ton of room to grow.

Solid camera availability has become a lot easier, and access to computing inside of facilities is also a lot easier than ~10 years ago, but the issue is in more what Systems Integrator/internal team supports the cameras for things like calibration issues/fairly standard software problems like there's a pretty crappy UI so the ops team who has to use the product hates it

1

u/LabCertain1304 2h ago

Quality inspection is my specialty -- computer vision for quality inspection is lightyears ahead of everything else in the deployed AI space, and there's still a ton of room to grow.

Solid camera availability has become a lot easier, and access to computing inside of facilities is also a lot easier than ~10 years ago, but the issue is in more what Systems Integrator/internal team supports the cameras for things like calibration issues/fairly standard software problems like there's a pretty crappy UI so the ops team who has to use the product hates it

5

u/learnthenlearnmore 1d ago

If I need to write something like a procedure or presentation it does a lot of the heavy lifting.

6

u/sarnold95 1d ago

Yeah same! It’s great at starting an outline an tailoring to what you need. Then you can fill out the details.

3

u/Theredman101 1d ago

I use it to track the weather which tells me what additives i need to put in my paint based on all weather conditions.

2

u/LumashapeAI 13h ago

I work in a smaller machine shop. We developed software for an AI semi-automated tool organization workflow.

https://lumashape.com

3

u/Best_Help_4942 1d ago

I uses it to do bunch of admin related stuff such as making flow charts, SOPs, work manual, etc.

And i used it to do some technical R&D studies

1

u/sarnold95 1d ago

Do you use it to make outline or actual SOPs and manuals?

1

u/Hixo_7 1d ago

I once use it to make a project title sounds less evil.

Was justifying an automation project to lessen operator. Use optimized process instead.

While our dev guys using it to detect product defects more accurately.

1

u/upvotechemistry 1d ago

I used it extensively when I was in operations for templates and example SOPs based on best standard practice. You have to tailor the results to your process and application, but it helps to get the ball rolling

1

u/TheRockerz 1d ago

I've used AI mostly to write template sales mails, it really helps with providing better clarity to your mails once you add context to it before asking it to generate a mail.

Other than that, I've used it to when I want to ascertain things by backing it up with research papers. Asking for sources in ChatGPT is sometimes finicky but you can make it work if you use the keywords and not entire sentences to search for the papers.

1

u/stealthdawg 1d ago

we use an AI tool that writes our toolpath code for us. basically it will replace.the.need for.a human to program the machines that create things

1

u/Kink3 1d ago

I've used it to calculate how much power usage a machine may see and the associated costs. It's very basic considering what some of you are doing.

1

u/GunsFireFreedom 21h ago

One area I’ve found it really good at is finding manufacturers and distributors of products. Give it a prompt for a specific tool set, fixture, material, or service and get a pretty good result that’s easy to customize and way better search results than Google targeted advertising.

1

u/slater_just_slater 18h ago

Visual inspection is a big use of AI, ML for predicive maintenance. I can see it automating some maintenance paperwork functions (punch list purchases, prioritizing, work orders.

For food producers, I see potential uses for predictive batch adjustments based on ingredients variants and weather.

1

u/eske8643 14h ago

We dont us AI at all in our production. Its simply too open, and leaves us woundable to hacks or spyware. Our entire production is Airgapped to prevent any intrusions, and all our technical files are the same.

1

u/Mangedorsvoyage 11h ago

Engineering BOM to Manufacturing BOM conversion
3 way match between PO, BoL and invoice
inventory allocation report for unused inventory

1

u/sarnold95 11h ago

How are you doing that?

1

u/Mangedorsvoyage 11h ago

We develop the solutions ourselves for our manufacturing clients. We implement and develop softwares.

1

u/Glugamesh 1d ago

I use it to generate calibration reports from directories full of data files. I also use it to generate small databases to keep track of tooling or whatever. It's better at SQL lite than I am.

3

u/sarnold95 1d ago

I used it to create ~250 lines of code for automating my budget tracking spreadsheet. Took some work but still really cool and way better at coding than i am lol

1

u/Robots_Never_Die 20h ago

You should try v0.dev for code. I've had good luck with it writing python code for me.

V0 spit out full fledged source code that worked right away when chatgpt would just spit out weirdly written functions.

1

u/sarnold95 18h ago

Yeah it took probably 5-6 hours of troubleshooting and it would forget things randomly and leave it out of the code. Super frustrating. Will check it out.

1

u/uptownshaggy 1d ago

It’s been able to help analyze competition and potential clients

Productivity Anyone using AI in manufacturing? How are you using it in your job?

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