Intelligent Inspection Research Articles

Intelligent Inspection System for Power Insulators Based on AAV on Complex Weather Conditions

Intelligent Inspection System for Power Insulators Based on AAV on Complex Weather Conditions

Intelligent inspection and quality control of table olives

Quality is a key factor of product-marketing in the field of agriculture and food industry. A number of researches have suggested the use of vision computer systems and machine learning (ML) techniques essentially to inspect imperfection surfaces and defects in fruit products. Following the trend, this paper still relies on the use of vision computer system by assuring an intelligent detection of table olive defect, with a certainty of its quality control. The specifically exploited computer vision system consists of automatically extracting the texture, colour, and shape features mainly from the global thresholding segmented image. With reference to the extracted features, the newly introduced system has the capacities of distinguishing between the defected and the healthy olive fruits rapidly and effectively at the same time. Subsequently, it is capable of identifying and specifying the diseased table olive. This system is also helpful for estimating the table olive size automatically. The experimental findings are indicative of the high accuracy of the binary classification algorithm, reaching 99, 32%, the average processing time for just one olive is about 0.4 s, which could meet the requirements of the real-time applications, and the error in estimating the size of the table olives does not exceed 10%.

Further Application Of Automatic Control Based On Servo Motor In Smart Grid

The paper summarize the advantages and applications of servo motor. As a kind of equipment that can replace manual long-distance inspection, the intelligent inspection device for overhead transmission lines can significantly improve inspection efficiency and reduce labor intensity. The servo motor with high power density and low torque ripple can guarantee the high precision and stable operation of the intelligent inspection device in line inspection, which provides a certain practical intelligent application significance for transmission line inspection.

Development of Intelligent Testing and Evaluation System for Fracturing Pump

Abstract Fracturing truck is the key technical equipment for oil and gas production stimulation. Fracturing pump of fracturing truck is subjected to high pressure load for a long time during use. Due to the influence of many factors such as transportation and equipment aging, the performance of fracturing pump in field use is reduced and the output power is insufficient. In order to realize the on-site inspection of fracturing pump, a set of intelligent inspection and evaluation system of fracturing pump is developed. Through the establishment of the hardware test platform and the development of the software system, the intelligent inspection and evaluation system of fracturing pump with the features of one-click automatic detection, automatic analysis of performance indicators, intelligent prediction and maintenance of health status is realized. The system can support the static pressure test, water power test and overpressure protection test of 140MPa ultra-high pressure fracturing pump. Experimental tests show that the test accuracy of the equipment can effectively meet the detection and evaluation needs of the field fracturing truck, ensure the normal function through static pressure and water power detection, and determine the safety of the equipment through overpressure protection detection, which greatly improves the effect and efficiency of fracturing operations.

A Motion Planner Based on Mask-D3QN of Quadruped Robot Motion for Steam Generator.

Crawling robots are the focus of intelligent inspection research, and the main feature of this type of robot is the flexibility of in-plane attitude adjustment. The crawling robot HIT_Spibot is a new type of steam generator heat transfer tube inspection robot with a unique mobility capability different from traditional quadrupedal robots. This paper introduces a hierarchical motion planning approach for HIT_Spibot, aiming to achieve efficient and agile maneuverability. The proposed method integrates three distinct planners to handle complex motion tasks: a nonlinear optimization-based base motion planner, a TOPSIS-based base orientation planner, and a Mask-D3QN (MD3QN) algorithm-based gait motion planner. Initially, the robot's base and foot workspace were delineated through envelope analysis, followed by trajectory computation using Larangian methods. Subsequently, the TOPSIS algorithm was employed to establish an evaluation framework conducive to foundational turning planning. Finally, the MD3QN algorithm trained foot-points to facilitate robot movement along predefined paths. Experimental results demonstrated the method's adaptability across diverse tube structures, showcasing robust performance even in environments with random obstacles. Compared to the D3QN algorithm, MD3QN achieved a 100% success rate, enhanced average overall scores by 6.27%, reduced average stride lengths by 39.04%, and attained a stability rate of 58.02%. These results not only validate the effectiveness and practicality of the method but also showcase the significant potential of HIT_Spibot in the field of industrial inspection.

Technologies and Platforms for Remote and Autonomous Bridge Inspection – Review

Recent scientific and technological advancements have enabled a more efficient structural condition assessment of bridges, mainly through the implementation of intelligent inspection strategies. These intelligent strategies can provide early identification of critically damaged components before failure, and will therefore play a key role in extending the life of infrastructure. The latest inspection technologies can provide inspection plans with damage conditions, create a damage report as well as provide statistics and comparisons to the previous inspection findings. The new and existing inspection technologies are directed to help with the digitalization of the Bridge Management System (BMS). The complexity of maintenance/inspection requires organized, automated, open and transparent digital processes, which should consider both—structure and asset management data. Further, the inspection/monitoring findings serve as a source for decision-making models. The digitalized aspects of autonomous inspection provide better performance prediction models and guarantee safety for the users. This paper presents the latest findings in the field of remote inspection of bridges. In particular, the main technologies for inspection and geometrical assessment are depicted, especially those based on computer vision systems installed in UAVs and robots, LiDAR, radar, satellites and other non-contact systems including on-board monitoring. The accompanying article entitled: “Methodologies for remote bridge inspection” deals with the methodologies used for data processing based on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Development of a Small-Sized Urban Cable Conduit Inspection Robot

Cable conduits are crucial for urban power transmission and distribution systems. However, current conduit robots are often large and susceptible to tilting issues, which hampers the effective and intelligent inspection of these conduits. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a smaller-sized conduit inspection robot to address these challenges. Based on an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the cable conduit working environment and the associated functional requirements, this study successfully developed a small-scale urban cable conduit inspection robot prototype. This development was grounded in relevant design theories, simulation analyses, and experimental tests. The test results demonstrate that the robot’s bracing module effectively prevents tilting within the conduit. Additionally, the detection module enables comprehensive 360-degree conduit inspections, and the vacuuming module meets the negative pressure requirements for efficient absorption of dust and foreign matter. The robot has met the expected design goals, effectively enhanced the automation of the cable conduit construction process, and improved the quality control of cable laying.

Fourier Features and Machine Learning for Contour Profile Inspection in CNC Milling Parts: A Novel Intelligent Inspection Method (NIIM)

Form deviation generated during the milling profile process challenges the precision and functionality of industrial fixtures and product manufacturing across various sectors. Inspecting contour profile quality relies on commonly employed contact methods for measuring form deviation. However, the methods employed frequently face limitations that can impact the reliability and overall accuracy of the inspection process. This paper introduces a novel approach, the novel intelligent inspection method (NIIM), developed to accurately inspect and categorize contour profiles in machined parts manufactured through the milling process by computer numerical control (CNC) machines. The NIIM integrates a calibration piece, a vision system (RAM-StarliteTM), and machine learning techniques to analyze the line profile and classify the quality of contour profile deformation generated during CNC milling. The calibration piece is specifically designed to identify form deviations in the contour profile during the milling process. The RAM-StarliteTM vision system captures contour profile images corresponding to curves, lines, and slopes. An algorithm generates a profile signature, extracting Fourier descriptor features from the contour profile to analyze form deviations compared to an image reference. A feed-forward neural network is employed to classify contour profiles based on quality properties. Experimental evaluations involving 60 machined calibration pieces, resulting in 356 images for training and testing, demonstrate the accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed NIIM for profile line tolerance inspection. The results demonstrate that the NIIM offers 96.99% accuracy, low computational requirements, 100% inspection capability, and valuable information to improve machining parameters, as well as quality classification.

A Study on the Improvement of YOLOv5 and the Quality Detection Method for Cork Discs

Combining machine vision and deep learning, optical detection technology can achieve intelligent inspection. To address the issues of low efficiency and poor consistency in the quality classification of cork discs used for making badminton heads, research on optimizing the YOLOv5 image-processing algorithm was conducted and applied to cork disc quality detection. Real-time images of cork discs were captured using industrial cameras, and a dataset was independently constructed. A GAN-based defect synthesis algorithm was employed to resolve the lack of defect samples. An attention mechanism was embedded in the YOLOv5 backbone network to enhance feature representation. The number of anchors in the YOLOv5 detection layer was reduced to address similar sample sizes, a center-matching strategy was designed to balance positive samples, and a shortest-distance label assignment algorithm was developed to eliminate ambiguities, improving accuracy and reducing postprocessing complexity. Detection results were integrated into quality classification. Experiments on the NVIDIA RTX3080 GPU demonstrated that the optimized algorithm improved the original YOLOv5 F1 score by 2.4% and mF1 score by 9.0%, achieving a quality classification F1 score of 95.1%, a processing speed of 178.5 FPS, and an mAP of 81.5%. Comparative experiments showed that the improved algorithm achieved the best detection accuracy on the cork disc dataset while maintaining high processing speed.

An Enhanced SL-YOLOv8-Based Lightweight Remote Sensing Detection Algorithm for Identifying Broken Strands in Transmission Lines

Power transmission lines frequently face threats from lightning strikes, severe storms, and chemical corrosion, which can lead to damage in steel–aluminum-stranded wires, thereby seriously affecting the stability of the power system. Currently, manual inspections are relatively inefficient and high risk, while drone inspections are often limited by complex environments and obstacles. Existing detection algorithms still face difficulties in identifying broken strands. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new method called SL-YOLOv8. This method incorporates an improved You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8) algorithm, specifically designed for online intelligent inspection robots to detect broken strands in transmission lines. Transmission lines are susceptible to lightning strikes, storms, and chemical corrosion, which is leading to the potential failure of steel- and aluminum-stranded lines, and significantly impacting the stability of the power system. Currently, manual inspections come with relatively low efficiency and high risk, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) inspections are hindered by complex situations and obstacles, with current algorithms making it difficult to detect the broken strand lines. This paper proposes SL-YOLOv8, which is a broken transmission line strand detection method for an online intelligent inspection robot combined with an improved You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8). By incorporating the Squeeze-and-Excitation Network version 2 (SENet_v2) into the feature fusion network, the method effectively enhances adaptive feature representation by focusing on and amplifying key information, thereby improving the network’s capability to detect small objects. Additionally, the introduction of the LSKblockAttention module, which combines Large Selective Kernels (LSKs) and the attention mechanism, allows the model to dynamically select and enhance critical features, significantly enhancing detection accuracy and robustness while maintaining model precision. Compared with the original YOLOv8 algorithm, SL-YOLOv8 demonstrates improved precision recognition accuracy in Break-ID-1632 and cable damage datasets. The precision is increased by 3.9% and 2.7%, and the recall is increased by 12.2% and 2.3%, respectively, for the two datasets. The mean average precision (mAP) at the Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 is also increased by 4.9% and 1.2%, showing the SL-YOLOv8’s effectiveness in accurately identifying small objects in complex situations.

A Comprehensive Survey on Visual Perception Methods for Intelligent Inspection of High Dam Hubs.

There are many high dam hubs in the world, and the regular inspection of high dams is a critical task for ensuring their safe operation. Traditional manual inspection methods pose challenges related to the complexity of the on-site environment, the heavy inspection workload, and the difficulty in manually observing inspection points, which often result in low efficiency and errors related to the influence of subjective factors. Therefore, the introduction of intelligent inspection technology in this context is urgently necessary. With the development of UAVs, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and other technologies, the intelligent inspection of high dams based on visual perception has become possible, and related research has received extensive attention. This article summarizes the contents of high dam safety inspections and reviews recent studies on visual perception techniques in the context of intelligent inspections. First, this article categorizes image enhancement methods into those based on histogram equalization, Retinex, and deep learning. Representative methods and their characteristics are elaborated for each category, and the associated development trends are analyzed. Second, this article systematically enumerates the principal achievements of defect and obstacle perception methods, focusing on those based on traditional image processing and machine learning approaches, and outlines the main techniques and characteristics. Additionally, this article analyzes the principal methods for damage quantification based on visual perception. Finally, the major issues related to applying visual perception techniques for the intelligent safety inspection of high dams are summarized and future research directions are proposed.

DSN-BR-Based Online Inspection Method and Application for Surface Defects of Pharmaceutical Products in Aluminum-Plastic Blister Packages

Ensuring high product quality is of paramount importance in pharmaceutical drug manufacturing, as it is subject to rigorous regulatory practices. This study presents a research focused on the development of an on-line detection method and system for identifying surface defects in pharmaceutical products packaged in aluminum-plastic blisters. Firstly, the aluminum-plastic blister packages exhibit multi-scale features and inter-class indistinction. To address this, the deep semantic network with boundary refinement (DSN-BR) model is proposed, which leverages semantic segmentation domain knowledge, to accurately segment the defects in pixel level. Additionally, a specialized image acquisition module that minimizes the impact of ambient light is established, ensuring high-quality image capture. Finally, the image acquisition module, image detection module, and data management module are designed to construct a comprehensive online surface defect detection system. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we employ a real dataset for instance verification on the implemented system. The experimental results substantiate the outstanding performance of the DSN-BR, achieving the mean intersection over union (MIoU) of 90.5%. Furthermore, the proposed system achieves an inference speed of up to 14.12 f/s, while attaining an F1-Score of 98.25%. These results demonstrate that the system meets the actual needs of the enterprise and provides theoretical and methodological support for intelligent inspection of product surface quality. By standardizing the control process of pharmaceutical manufacturing and improving the management capability of the manufacturing process, our approach holds significant market application prospects.

A lightweight and accurate recognition algorithm of pointer meter based on improved Deeplabv3+ for inspection robots

Pointer meter is widely utilized in the fields of modern industry. Nowadays, intelligent inspection robots are gradually employed in place of labors for inspection task. Pointer meter recognition is one of the most important tasks of inspection robots. This article presents a lightweight pointer meter recognition algorithm, which is suitable for deployment on inspection robots. First, pointer meter is identified by pruned YOLOv5. Afterwards, the dial and the pointer are segmented through improved Deeplabv3+ in which the JPU and depthwise separable convolutions are utilized in lieu of dilated convolutions. After perspective transform and central-line extraction of pointer, the reading of the pointer meter can be determined using the angle method. Experimental results verify the FPS of pruned YOLOv5 improves 13.18% compared to original YOLOv5 and the FPS of improved Deeplabv3+ improves 45.74% compared to original Deeplabv3+. Additionally, the reading accuracy of the algorithm is 98.40% and average fiducial error is 0.32%, which indicate good accuracy. The relative standard deviation of reading is less than 1.4%, which indicates good stability of proposed algorithm. This study proposes a lightweight and accurate pointer meter recognition algorithm based on improved Deeplabv3+, the algorithm is ported to NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX to verify its stability and accuracy.

Application research of UAV infrared diagnosis technology in intelligent inspection of substations

This study proposes an improved YOLOv4 algorithm based on mixed domain attention mechanism to design an intelligent substation inspection system. The proposed method combines improvement strategies such as lightweight, depthwise separable convolution, and mixed attention mechanism. The experimental results showed that the identification accuracy of the proposed model was only reduced by 0.2% for test samples at different positions, promoting the accuracy of intelligent inspection to reach 97.5%. The mIoU, mAP, detection speed, and recognition accuracy of the model constructed by the research were 78.34%, 95.12%, 62.05 frames per second, and 95.12%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed model could comprehensively enhance the information expression and recognition accuracy of the system, while promoting intelligent inspection to achieve high accuracy.

Intelligent Inspection Method and System of Plastic Gear Surface Defects Based on Adaptive Sample Weighting Deep Learning Model.

After injection molding, plastic gears often exhibit surface defects, including those on end faces and tooth surfaces. These defects encompass a wide range of types and possess complex characteristics, which pose challenges for inspection. Current visual inspection systems for plastic gears suffer from limitations such as single-category defect inspection and low accuracy. There is an urgent industry need for a comprehensive and accurate method and system for inspecting defects on plastic gears, with improved inspection capability and higher accuracy. This paper presents an intelligent inspection algorithm network for plastic gear defects (PGD-net), which effectively captures subtle defect features at arbitrary locations on the surface compared to other models. An adaptive sample weighting method is proposed and integrated into an improved Focal-IoU loss function to address the issue of low inspection accuracy caused by imbalanced defect dataset distributions, thus enhancing the regression accuracy for difficult defect categories. CoordConv layers are incorporated into each inspection head to improve the model's generalization capability. Furthermore, a dataset of plastic gear surface defects comprising 16 types of defects is constructed, and our algorithm is trained and tested on this dataset. The PGD-net achieves a comprehensive mean average precision (mAP) value of 95.6% for the 16 defect types. Additionally, an online inspection system is developed based on the PGD-net algorithm, which can be integrated with plastic gear production lines to achieve online full inspection and automatic sorting of plastic gear defects. The entire system has been successfully applied in plastic gear production lines, conducting daily inspections of over 60,000 gears.

A Novel Adversarial Deep Learning Method for Substation Defect Image Generation.

The presence of defects in substation equipment is a major factor affecting the safety of power transmission. Therefore, timely and accurate detection of these defects is crucial. As intelligent inspection robots advance, using mainstream object detection models to diagnose surface defects in substation equipment has become a focal point of current research. However, the lack of defect image data is one of the main factors affecting the accuracy of supervised deep learning-based defect detection models. To address the issue of insufficient training data for defect images with complex backgrounds, such as rust and surface oil leakage in substation equipment, which leads to the poor performance of detection models, this paper proposes a novel adversarial deep learning model for substation defect image generation: the Abnormal Defect Detection Generative Adversarial Network (ADD-GAN). Unlike existing generative adversarial networks, this model generates defect images based on effectively segmented local areas of substation equipment images, avoiding image distortion caused by global style changes. Additionally, the model uses a joint discriminator for both overall images and defect images to address the issue of low attention to local defect areas, thereby reducing the loss of image features. This approach enhances the overall quality of generated images as well as locally generated defect images, ultimately improving image realism. Experimental results demonstrate that the YOLOV7 object detection model trained on the dataset generated using the ADD-GAN method achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 81.5% on the test dataset, and outperforms other image data augmentation and generation methods. This confirms that the ADD-GAN method can generate a high-fidelity image dataset of substation equipment defects.

Detection and Assessment of Seismic Response of High-Speed Railway Bridges Based on Smartphone Public Participation

The seismic response detection and operational safety assessment of high-speed railway (HSR) bridges play a crucial role in ensuring HSR systems’ operational safety and reliability. Smartphones have introduced intelligent inspection tools for structural health detection, becoming a new tool for intelligent structural inspection. Combining the public and smartphones is the key to public participation in structural health detection. This study utilizes smartphone-based structural seismic response inspection technology to investigate the framework of public participation in earthquake response inspection and assessment. This system comprises the Smart Bridge Brain (SBB), which integrates data from multiple sources and systems, an assigning mechanism for public participation inspection tasks, and smartphone-based HSR bridge structural seismic response inspection technology. At the same time, the Unreal Engine 5.0 software is used to create a mixed-reality virtual simulation experimental environment to validate the feasibility of this framework. The results indicate that the intelligent optimization of task allocation by the SBB successfully assigns detection tasks to each public participant. Public participants can promptly reach predefined damage structure detection targets and rapidly inspect bridge structural seismic response indicators using smartphones. In addition, this paper also conducts a comprehensive evaluation and analysis of the detection of the work efficiency index (WEI) within the system. Furthermore, optimization strategies for the efficient execution of detection tasks are proposed based on WEI variations influenced by different factors. The system framework is expected to enhance cluster-based HSR bridges’ intelligent disaster prevention and mitigation capabilities.

A Multi-Hop End-Edge Cooperative Computing Scheme for Power IoT

With the continuous development of the power Internet of Things (PIoT), smart devices (SDs) have been widely used in electric power inspections. Due to the limited resources of intelligent inspection SDs and the distance of overhead transmission lines, many inspection tasks cannot be processed promptly. This paper proposes a multi-hop-based end-edge cooperative computing (MHCC) scheme to address inspection task processing in power IoT. We formulate a multi-hop task offloading problem that minimizes the energy consumption of inspection SDs with delay constraints. We develop a JDPSO algorithm to solve the multi-hop task offloading problem and evaluate the algorithm’s performance based on numerous simulation experiments. The experimental results show that JDPSO reduces the system’s energy consumption by 56.30%, 48.56%, 78.87%, 50.89%, 30.85%, and 68.31%, and also reduces delay by 50.69%, 42.78%, 58.67%, 44.84%, 10.22%, and 62.88% compared to GA, RSA, SSA, MFO, DOA, and ALC schemes.

A laser ultrasonic intelligent inspection method for metal surface defects based on digital twin model

To enhance the efficiency and intelligence of laser ultrasonic detection of metal surface defects, a detection method based on digital twins is proposed. Given the scarcity of defect samples and the difficulty of obtaining labeled data in practical applications, the finite element method is used to construct a laser ultrasonic metal defect detection model, effectively generating twin data for defect detection. With the help of generative adversarial networks, the distribution difference between twin data and real data is minimized. Additionally, by using continuous wavelet transform, one-dimensional ultrasonic signals are converted into two-dimensional time–frequency images for detection input. In terms of detection algorithm development, a residual network with an optimized global attention mechanism is introduced to ensure real-time synchronization and updates between the digital twin model and the actual laser ultrasonic detection equipment. Finally, experimental validation of the proposed method shows that it effectively addresses the issue of small sample sizes in defect detection and achieves high detection accuracy. Moreover, comparative experiments on crack defect migration tasks under different settings demonstrate the method’s good generalization ability.

The Evolving Technological Framework and Emerging Trends in Electrical Intelligence within Nuclear Power Facilities

This paper thoroughly explores the feasibility of integrating a variety of intelligent electrical equipment and smart maintenance technologies within nuclear power plants to enhance the currently limited level of intelligence of these systems and better support operational and maintenance tasks. Initially, this paper outlines the demands and challenges of intelligent electrical systems in nuclear power plants, highlighting the current state of development of intelligent electrical systems, including new applications of artificial intelligence and big data technologies in power grid companies, such as intelligent defect recognition through image recognition, intelligence-assisted inspections, and intelligent production commands. This paper then provides a detailed introduction to the architecture of intelligent electrical equipment, encompassing the smart electrical equipment layer, the smart control system layer, and the cloud platform layer. It discusses the intelligentization of medium- and low-voltage electrical equipment, such as smart circuit breakers, smart switchgear, and low-voltage distribution systems, emphasizing the importance of intelligentization in improving the safety, reliability, and maintenance efficiency of medium- and low-voltage distribution equipment in nuclear power plants. Furthermore, this paper addresses issues in the intelligentization of nuclear power plant electrical systems, such as information silos, the inefficiency of traditional manual inspection processes, and the lack of comprehensive intelligent design and evaluation standards, proposing corresponding solutions. Additionally, this paper presents the trends in intelligent operation and maintenance technology and applications, including primary and secondary fusion technology, intelligent patrol system architecture, intelligent inspection based on non-destructive testing, and a comprehensive solution based on inspection robots. The application of these technologies aids in achieving automated inspection, real-time monitoring, and the intelligent diagnosis of electrical equipment in nuclear power plants. Finally, this paper proposes basic principles for the development of intelligent electrical systems in nuclear power plants, including intelligent architecture, the evolutionary path, and phased goals and key technologies. It emphasizes the gradual transition from automation to digitization and then to intelligentization and presents a specific implementation plan for the intelligentization of the electrical systems in nuclear power plants. This paper concludes with a summary of short-term and long-term goals for improving the performance of nuclear power plant electrical systems through intelligent technologies and prospects for the application of intelligent technologies in the operation and maintenance of nuclear power plants in the future.