AI-powered industrial robots expand application in Changzhou

AI-powered industrial robots see broader application in Changzhou City of east China’s Jiangsu Province, which improves efficiency of quality inspection in factories while aiding the re-employment of workers.
Changzhou is a hub of China’s robotics industry. It hosts around 150 companies that span the entire robot industrial chain, with a scale of nearly 30 billion yuan (about 4.21 billion U.S. dollars).
In Micro-Intelligence, a tech company based in Changzhou, a group of AI-powered industrial robots are undergoing the final round of training and testing.
An intelligent robot can learn and simulate human movements quickly. The camera positioned above its arm observes every movement of a person’s hand, allowing it to analyze, learn, and comprehend these motions to replicate what it “sees”.
“We give the robot an ‘eye’ and ‘brain’ to help it recognize the surrounding environment. We transmit the information and data it collects to the large model, enabling it to understand tasks, instructions and movements,” said Pan Zhengyi, general manager of the company, as he introduced the latest model of the industrial robot launched by his company.
Such robots can be applied to a variety of scenarios to satisfy growing needs in the market.
“We initially used the robot in quality inspection, spanning from manufacturing of 3C (computer, communication and consumer electronics), vehicles, small home appliances, and lens to electric motor stators and rotors for new energy vehicles, as well as interior and exterior components of vehicles and large die-casting parts. The market demand for these robots is quite substantial,” said Pan.
In a company manufacturing flat wire motors in Changzhou, these AI-powered industrial robots are performing a difficult inspection task.
“A flat wire motor has about 288 wielding points. When people inspect these parts, their eyes would get tired, which would lead to misjudgments and missed errors. We launched the second intelligent production line in July, which reduces the time for inspection from five minutes to less than 2.5 minutes, and the pass rate can exceed 95 percent,” said Qin Jinyu, general manager of the company.
In a workshop of a 3C electronics manufacturing factory in Changzhou, 64 smart industrial robots are operating at high speed, using their mechanical arms to conduct quality inspection on smartphone camera brackets.
A workshop next to it used to be filled with workers to inspect electronics, but now only several workers still need to work there, since just a handful of short-term projects still require human visual inspection.
Having performed inspection tasks for 19 years, Wang Hui used to be one of those workers who had to identify defects on around 10,000 parts a day per person. But now, leveraging her extensive experience, Wang has transitioned to an AI annotator at Micro-Intelligence, identifying and tagging data samples that are typically used to train machine learning models.
“Now on the company’s platform, I use tools to annotate defects on images of products, leveraging my past experience of manual inspection to generate data for models to learn from,” she said.
There are more than 50 AI annotators in the company who successfully transitioned from inspectors like her. Such kind of transition contributes to the re-employment of laid-off workers and creates a bridge connecting factories, machines, and large AI models, Wang said.
AI-powered industrial robots expand application in Changzhou
AI-powered industrial robots expand application in Changzhou
China’s Shenzhou-19 astronauts will carry out 86 scientific experiments in space after they entered China’s space station, the China Manned Space Agency announced at a press conference on Tuesday.
The Shenzhou-19 crewed spaceship is scheduled to be launched at 4:27 Wednesday (Beijing Time) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, said Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for the agency. Chinese astronauts Cai Xuzhe, Song Lingdong and Wang Haoze will carry out the Shenzhou-19 crewed spaceflight mission, and Cai will be the commander.
Speaking at the press conference, Lin introduced the arrangements and highlights of Shenzhou-19 mission in space science.
“During the Shenzhou-19 flight, the focus will be on the planned theme of ‘biological and physical sciences in space,’ covering fields such as space life science, basic physics of microgravity, space material science, space medicine, and new space technologies. A total of 86 space science research and technology experiments will be carried out, including the structural analysis of protein crystal growth, and non-equilibrium dynamics of soft matter under microgravity conditions. It is expected to make a number of scientific achievements in frontier research on basic theories, development of new materials, physiological effect mechanism of space radiation and weightlessness, hypomagnetic biological effects and molecular mechanisms,” he explained.
“On the occasion of the second anniversary of the completion of China’s space station , we will release the ‘Report on the Scientific Research and Application Development of the Space Station’ to the society, introducing the representative results achieved since the space station entered the orbit,” Lin continued.
He also stated that in the future, the flight missions will further focus on key issues, strengthen the organic integration of scientific objectives and manned spaceflight missions, and make greater contributions to building a space power for the high-quality development of space science.
Shenzhou-19 crew to conduct 86 scientific experiments in space
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