• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.504-509
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• 2016

Defects in dissimilar metal welds are reported to be on the increase during the operating lifespan and aging of nuclear power plants. In Korea, reported cases of defects due to dissimilar metal welds include the drain nozzle of a steam generator and RCS hot tube sampling nozzles. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a reliable automated nondestructive inspection technique and a system for the inspection of dissimilar metal welds of small diameter nozzles in a high radiation area of a nuclear power plant. In this study, to ensure effective defect inspection of small diameter nozzles (RCS high-temperature tube sampling nozzle) of a nuclear power plant, three different methods were developed. These include: (1) optimum inspection probe design by beam simulation, (2) multi-directions UT optimum inspection technique for the inspection of small diameters of different welded parts, and (3) remote control automatic inspection system. The developed technique and systems have been verified to be suitable for use in the inspection of defects in smaller diameter nozzles in nuclear power plants.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.453-458
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• 2016

One of the most common applications of machine vision is quality inspections in automated production. In this study, a welding inspection system that is controlled by a PC and a PLC equipped with a multi-camera setup was developed. The system was designed to measure the primary dimensions, such as the length and width of the welding areas. The TCP/IP protocols and multi-threading techniques were used for parallel control of the optical components and physical distribution. A coaxial light was used to maintain uniform lighting conditions and enhance the image quality of the weld areas. The core image processing system was established through a combination of various algorithms from the OpenCV library. The proposed vision inspection system was fully validated for an actual weld production line and was shown to satisfy the functional and performance requirements.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.367-372
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• 2010

A power plant's heat exchangers work under poor conditions, such as high temperature, high pressure, corrosion, mechanical stress and vibration. Especially, partial joint-weld of heat exchanger's header to stub-tube is the place where incomplete penetration flaws can easily occur. But, it is hard to evaluate the safety of the structure by conventional nondestructive testing techniques. So it is necessary to test integrity of the weld inside and to develop testing technique and equipment that can detect the flaws at the weld point in order to enhance reliability of the test result. In this study, we developed a suitable automated ultrasonic testing system that can inspect the partial joint-weld of header to stub-tube of power plant. Finally, we showed the efficiency of the automated ultrasonic-testing-system from the application.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.8-14
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• 2020

In general, auto parts production assembly line is assembled and produced by automatic mounting by an automated robot. In such a production site, quality problems such as misalignment of parts (doors, trunks, roofs, etc.) to be assembled with the vehicle body or collision between assembly robots and components are often caused. In order to solve such a problem, the quality of parts is manually inspected by using mechanical jig devices outside the automated production line. Automotive inspection technology is the most commonly used field of vision, which includes surface inspection such as mounting hole spacing and defect detection, body panel dents and bends. It is used for guiding, providing location information to the robot controller to adjust the robot's path to improve process productivity and manufacturing flexibility. The most difficult weighing and measuring technology is to calibrate the surface analysis and position and characteristics between parts by storing images of the part to be measured that enters the camera's field of view mounted on the side or top of the part. The problem of the machine vision device applied to the automobile production line is that the lighting conditions inside the factory are severely changed due to various weather changes such as morning-evening, rainy days and sunny days through the exterior window of the assembly production plant. In addition, since the material of the vehicle body parts is a steel sheet, the reflection of light is very severe, which causes a problem in that the quality of the captured image is greatly changed even with a small light change. In this study, the distance between the car body and the door part and the door are acquired by the measuring device combining the laser slit light source and the LED pattern light source. The result is transferred to the joint robot for assembling parts at the optimum position between parts, and the assembly is done at the optimal position by changing the angle and step.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.317-323
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• 2010

The manual ultrasonic examination for the nuclear power plant piping welds has been demonstrated by using KPD(Korean Performance Demonstration) generic procedure. For automated ultrasonic examination, there is no generic procedure and it should be qualified by using applicable automated equipment. Until now, most of qualified procedures used pulse-echo technique and there is no qualified procedure using phased array technique. In this study, data acquisition and analysis software were developed and phased-array transducer and wedge were designed to implement phased array technique for nuclear power plant in-service inspection. The developed procedure are qualified for performance demonstration for the flaw detection, length sizing and depth sizing. The qualified procedure will be applied for the field examination in the nuclear power plant piping weld inspection.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.169-175
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• 2010

Urinalysis is an important clinical test to diagnose urinary diseases, and dipstick method with visual inspection is widely applied in practice. Automated optical devices recently developed have disadvantages of long measurement time, big size and heavy weight, accuracy degradation with time, etc. The present study proposed a new computer scanning technique, in which the test strip and the standard chart were simultaneously scanned to remove any environmental artifacts, followed by automated differentiation with the minimum distance algorithm, leading to significant enhancement of accuracy. Experiments demonstrated an accuracy of 100 % in that all test results were identical with the human visual inspection. The present technique only uses a personal computer with scanner and shortens the test time to a great degree. The results are also stored and accumulated for later use which can be transmitted to remote locations through a network, thus could be easily integrated to any ubiquitous health care systems.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.377-388
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• 2006

Most structures experience deterioration after construction. A routine inspection and maintenance must be accomplished for the efficient use of the structures. The routine inspection will play a major role on the determination of maintenance period and method. This study aims development of an automated tunnel inspection system based upon a 3 dimensional laser scanner. As for the initial stage of the project, a prototype tunnel scanner has been developed. The development of a tunnel scanner prototype follows comparison between image scanning and laser scanning system and investigation on the applicability and adaptivity of the scanners to the railway tunnel scanner. The applicability of the laser scanner on the railway tunnel has been confirmed from the pilot test by using commercialized general purpose close range laser scanner and applicability of a laser scanner as a railway tunnel scanner has been checked. From the result, a prototype of railway tunnel scanner has been built and the calibration of the system was carried out. Finally the developed tunnel laser scanner has been applied to different shapes and sizes of tunnels in use.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute Of Construction Engineering and Management
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.680-685
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• 2006

Bridges are an integral part of Transportation that is always open to traffic.To effectively manage bridges today, more needs to be done to assess the day-to-day condition and behavior of bridges, and the deterioration rates of their components, so that efficient and proactive measures can be taken. Conventional methods consumemore time and they lack flexibility to reach all locations in high convoluted structures which most bridges offer. Instead, this work uses a new concept of robot, termed as Bridge inspecting robot, which, as its name suggests, possesses superior ability to flex, reach, and approach all points on the bridge. This study also provides economical feasibility model for the same and a comparison with existing bridge inspection and automated inspection work. Finally, we have uncovered few issues and did not analyze some information because of limitation to data.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.421-427
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• 2008

A robot crane truck is developed by the Bridge Inspection Robot Development Interface(BRIDI) for an automated and/or teleoperated bridge inspection. This crane truck looks similar to the conventional bucket crane, but is much smaller in size and light-weight. At the end of the telescoping boom which is 12m long, a robot platform is mounted which allows the operator to scan the bridge structure under the deck trough the camera. Boom vibration induced by wind and deck movement can cause serious problems in this scanning system. This paper presents a control system to mitigate such vibration of the robot boom. In the proposed control system, an actuator is installed at the end of the working boom. This control system is studied using a mathematical model analysis with LQ control algorithm and a scaled model test in the laboratory. The study indicates that the proposed system is efficient for the vibration control of the robot booms, thereby demonstrating its immediate applicability in the field.