General Electric announced the "Guardian," a service robot that can perform predictive maintenance and optimization services during GE's annual summit on the Industrial Internet.
John Lizzi, Research and Development Manager at GE Global Research, introduced the "Guardian," an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) created by General Electrics during the annual Minds + Machines Summit held in New York.
According to Lizzi, the "Guardian" can perform "3 D" tasks-dull, dirty and dangerous jobs for different purposes in the health care industry, manufacturing industry and field service industry, leaving humans to do more advanced tasks involving problem solving and decision making.
The "Guardian" is part of GE's move to forward into the "Industrial Internet," a term coined by the company to mean the "Internet of things," where remote devices located in the field can conveniently provide businesses with important information like temperature changes and production rate, from afar.
GE developed Predix technology, where different equipment like medical imaging equipment and locomotives with sensors on them can collect and send vital information helping GE customers perform predictive maintenance on their equipment to reduce downtime and operate efficiently.
Vice President and commercial officer for sales and marketing at GE Kate Johnson gave an example of an offshore oil rig operator that was able to prevent a potential failure after detecting changes in production performance saving the oil company $7.5 million from production losses.
GE has already cashed in on the trend of the "Industrial Internet," with a reported $1 billion revenues generated by providing the technology to different companies like wind farm operator E.ON and AirAsia Group.
E.ON used the technology to increase turbine power generation by 4 percent while AirAsia was reportedly able to optimize traffic air flow saving the company $10 million in fuel costs.
Meanwhile, GE plans to make available 40 more applications and services to several companies in need of the technology before the year ends.
