哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）学术讲座

演讲人Speaker：东昕教授

题目Title: Continuum and soft Robots for Confined Spaces in Industrial Environments

时间Date：2024年12月 23日       Time：上午 10：00 ~ 12：00

地点Venue： L 栋 203  室  

内容摘要Abstract：

Industrial systems on land, air and sea contain safety-critical assemblies, such as engines, fuel tanks and pipelines, requiring periodic inspection to detect issues early, before expensive and unscheduled repairs and/or removal of these systems from service. However, inspection and repair of confined equipment require access to the spaces where complex components and parts are crammed. Therefore, the nature of these confined environments makes the in-situ inspection and repair operations inside such workspaces extremely difficult. As a popular research field, snake and soft robots have been developed for several decades, especially for minimally invasive surgery. Recently, a few academic research results have been successfully turned into commercial products. This presentation will present the research and recent advancements of snake and soft robots for completely new applications, which are used for the “healthcare” service of industrial systems. A brief review of the evolution of snake and soft robots will be presented first, followed by the research and challenges of several applications of these robotic systems in the industry, including aerospace, nuclear and oil and gas.

个人简介(About the speaker):

Dr. Xin Dong is part of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Group. He is also head of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre (UTC) in Manufacturing and On-Wing Technology at the University of Nottingham. His research interests are continuum and soft robots for inspection and repair in challenging environments. Dr. Dong has worked on the topic of continuum robots since the start of his PhD research in 2011. He led the development of the world's first continuum robot for in-situ coating repair of aero-engines (TRL6) in 2018 under FLARE (Innovate UK: 2015-2018) and deployed an 8m long continuum arm in an active nuclear cell at Dounreay site within Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in 2024 (GameChangers: 2022-2024).

Dr. Dong is an associate editor of the Journal of Field Robotics and a board member of the Early Career Forum in the EPSRC UK-RAS network. He served as the academic lead for coordinating the continuum robot development in several UKRI and ATI projects, including RAIN and RAIN+ (EPSRC: 2017-2022), CHIMERA (UKRI-2019-2022) and REINSTATE (ATI: 2020-2024).