Abstract:

Industrial inspection is essential for product quality assurance, safety, and long-term competitiveness. Traditional methods are labor-intensive, subject to human error and inconsistency. In this talk, two inspection applications will be introduced: bottled Chinese Baijiu inspection and underground pipe inspection.
To detect impurities in bottled Chinese Baijiu on production lines, an intelligent inspection method is developed. A mechanical bottle shaking scheme is designed and the trajectories of the impurities are extracted and used to construction the inspection model. Production implementation demonstrates that the proposed method is much better than the current manual inspection method.
For the underground pipeline inspection, the precise localization of the pipelines is essential. We developed an inner pipe robotic system which can go through pipe elbows and tees to perform inspection. Coupled with a kinematic dead-reckoning model and a constrained optimization method, the developed robotic system can construct a reliable trajectory with better performance than the current commercial devices.

Bibliography:

Heping Chen received the B.S. degree in Control System Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Ph.D.  in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Michigan State University, USA. Dr. Chen is a Professor of Practice at The University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, Dr. Chen was an Associate Professor at the Ingram School of Engineering, Texas State University, USA.
He worked as a research scientist and project manager at the Robotics and Automation Lab, ABB Corporate Research Center, USA. He has over 13 years industrial experience. He published more than 170 journal/conference papers and received more than 10 Best Paper Awards and Highly Commended Awards including the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. He has more than 50 patents. He is an IEEE Senior member and served in several IEEE international conferences as a General Chair, Program Chair and committee member.