A Dual-Channel Multimodal RAG System: OCR- and Semantic Description-Driven Question Answering for Industrial Robot After-Sales Service

Industrial robot after-sales question answering often depends on multimodal evidence, such as error screenshots, interface displays, and wiring diagrams, which are difficult for conventional text-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems to exploit effectively. To address this issue, we design a dual-channel multimodal RAG system that converts image content into retrievable textual knowledge through the collaboration of optical character recognition (OCR) and structured semantic description. In the proposed system, OCR is used to extract explicit textual cues, such as error codes, parameter fields, and interface prompts, while expert-authored semantic descriptions complement implicit visual evidence, including device parts, fault phenomena, and contextual scene information. The transformed knowledge is further integrated into a hybrid retrieval pipeline that combines dense retrieval and BM25, followed by Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) and Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) reordering to improve both relevance and contextual diversity. Experiments on a real-world industrial robot after-sales dataset show that the proposed method achieves an overall question-answering accuracy of 87.9%, outperforming the LLM-only baseline by 35.6 percentage points. For image-related questions, accuracy improves from 46.7% to 83.3%. These results indicate that the proposed framework provides a deployment-friendly and interpretable system-level alternative to end-to-end multimodal model fine-tuning for industrial after-sales question answering.