• Corrosion Science and Technology
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.253-257
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• 2019

A deep learning based real-time painting surface inspection algorithm is proposed herein, designed for developing an autonomous inspection drone. The painting surface inspection is usually conducted manually. However, the manual inspection has a limitation in obtaining accurate data for correct judgement on the surface because of human error and deviation of individual inspection experiences. The best method to replace manual surface inspection is the vision-based inspection method with a camera, using various image processing algorithms. Nevertheless, the visual inspection is difficult to apply to surface inspection due to diverse appearances of material, hue, and lightning effects. To overcome technical limitations, a deep learning-based pattern recognition algorithm is proposed, which is specialized for painting surface inspections. The proposed algorithm functions in real time on the embedded board mounted on an autonomous inspection drone. The inspection results data are stored in the database and used for training the deep learning algorithm to improve performance. The various experiments for pre-inspection of painting processes are performed to verify real-time performance of the proposed deep learning algorithm.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.216-222
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• 2021

Recently, various robots are being used for the purpose of structural inspection or safety diagnosis, and their needs are also rising rapidly. Among the structural inspection using robots, a lot of researches has recently been conducted on inspection of various facilities and structures using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). However, since GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals cannot be received in an environment near or below structures, the operation of UAVs has been done manually. For a stable autonomous flight without GNSS signals, additional technologies are required. This paper proposes the autonomous flight system for structural inspection consisting of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), path planning, and controls. The experiments were conducted on an actual large bridge to verify the feasibility of the system, and especially the performance of the proposed SLAM algorithm was compared through comparative analysis with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.194-200
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• 2016

Recently, UUVs (unmanned underwater vehicles) have increasingly been applied in various science and engineering applications. In-water inspection, which used to be performed by human divers, is a potential application for UUVs. In particular, the operational safety and performance of in-water inspection missions can be greatly improved by using an underwater robotic vehicle. The capabilities of hovering maneuvers and automatic image mosaicking are essential for autonomous underwater visual inspection. This paper presents the development of a hover-capable autonomous underwater vehicle system for autonomous in-water inspection, which includes both a hardware platform and operational software algorithms. Some results from an experiment in a model basin are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the developed system and algorithms.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.317-325
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• 2022

In this study, we propose a technological system designed to provide machine vision-based automatic inspection and autonomous operation services for an entire process related to product inspection in wire harness manufacturing. The smart factory paradigm is a valuable and necessary goal, small companies may encounter steep barriers to entry. Therefore, the best approach is to develop towards this approach gradually in stages starting with the relatively simple improvement to manufacturing processes, such as replacing manual quality assurance stages with machine vision-based inspection. In this study, we consider design issues of a system based on the proposed technology and describe an experimental implementation. In addition, we evaluated the implementation of the proposed technology. The test results show that the adoption of the proposed machine vision-based automatic inspection and operation service system for multi-wire harness production may be considered justified, and the effectiveness of the proposed technology was verified.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.733-749
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• 2020

This study presents a computer vision-based approach for representing time evolution of structural damages leveraging a database of inspection images. Spatially incoherent but temporally sorted archival images captured by robotic cameras are exploited to represent the damage evolution over a long period of time. An access to a sequence of time-stamped inspection data recording the damage growth dynamics is premised to this end. Identification of a structural defect in the most recent inspection data set triggers an exhaustive search into the images collected during the previous inspections looking for correspondences based on spatial proximity. This is followed by a view synthesis from multiple candidate images resulting in a single reconstruction for each inspection round. Cracks on concrete surface are used as a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. Once the chronology is established, the damage severity is quantified at various levels of time scale documenting its progression through time. The proposed scheme enables the prediction of damage severity at a future point in time providing a scope for preemptive measures against imminent structural failure. On the whole, it is believed that the present study will immensely benefit the structural inspectors by introducing the time dimension into the autonomous condition assessment pipeline.

• 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.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.617-627
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• 2021

In the field of on-road motor vehicles, the level for autonomous driving technology is defined according to J3016, proposed by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International. However, in the field of agricultural machinery, different standards are applied by country and manufacturer, without a standardized classification for autonomous driving technology which makes it difficult to clearly define and accurately evaluate the autonomous driving technology, for agricultural machinery. In this study, a method to classify the autonomy levels for autonomous agricultural machinery (ALAAM) is proposed by modifying the SAE International J3016 to better characterize various agricultural operations such as tillage, spraying and harvesting. The ALAAM was classified into 6 levels from 0 (manual) to 5 (full automation) depending on the status of operator and autonomous system interventions for each item related to the automation of agricultural tasks such as straight-curve path driving, path-implement operation, operation-environmental awareness, error response, and task area planning. The core of the ALAAM classification is based on the relative roles between the operator and autonomous system for the automation of agricultural machines. The proposed ALAAM is expected to promote the establishment of a standard to classify the autonomous driving levels of self-propelled agricultural machinery.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.881-891
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• 2020

In recent years robotics has become an important resource in engineering. Adoption of Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in activities related to ship inspections has obvious potential advantages, but also arises particular challenges, both from technical and legal viewpoints. The ROBINS project (ROBotics technology for INspection of Ships) is a collaborative project co-funded within the H2020 EU Research and Innovation programme call, aimed at filling the gap between current ship inspections approach and available robotic technology, both from technological and regulatory point of view. Main goal of the present work is to highlight how ship inspections are currently carried out by humans, how they could be improved using RAS, even if not completely autonomous for the time being, at least in selected operational scenarios and how the performances of RAS platforms can be tested to assess their effectiveness in carrying out surveys onboard. In such a framework, a testing facility aimed at assessing RAS' capabilities as well as providing suitable environment for their development has been built and it is still under development along with dedicated testing protocols, able to assess the equivalence between human and RAS inspection of ship and marine structures. The features of a testing facility where RAS can be tested and the testing protocols are presented, showing how technological and regulatory gaps are filled.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.227-237
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• 1997

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles(AUVs) have become an important tool for various purposes in subsea: inspection, recovery, construction, etc., and the development of autonomous control system is luglay desirable- thete zffe many problems associated with designing the control system for AUV due to unknown underwater envimn-Tnent, the possibility of subsystem failures, and unpredictable changes in the dynamics of the vehicle. In this paper, an autonomous control system based on the intelligent control theory to enhance operation efficiency of the ALTV is presented. The control system has a hierarchical structure which consists of mission planning level, mission control level, navigation level, and execution level. The performance of the control system is investigated by computer simulation. The results show that the proposed control system can be applied successfully to the AUV in spite of the possibility of failures in the vehicle and the collision hazard in the sea environment.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.75-80
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• 2008

This paper presents a vision based autonomous inspection system for welding quality control of a RV sinking seat. In order to overcome the precision error that arises from a visible inspection by an operator in the manufacturing process of a RV sinking seat, the machine vision based welding quality control system is proposed. It consists of the CMOS camera and the NI vision system. The geometry of the welding bead, which is the welding quality criteria, is measured by using the captured image with a median filter applied on it. The image processing software for the system was developed using the NI LabVIEW software. The proposed welding quality inspection system for RV sinking seat was verified using experimentation.