Autonomous Inspection in Manufacturing & Remanufacturing (AIMaReM)

高价值制造业是英国经济的重要组成部分，为我们的经济繁荣和世界各地的工程地位做出了巨大贡献。支持航空航天、核能和其他高完整性工程部件的高价值制造业的增长，对快速交付可靠和高质量的无损评估（NDE）来检查这些部件施加了巨大的压力。目前，许多安全关键部件的检查（有时需要100%的部件检查）是手动执行的，导致与NDE相关的重大瓶颈。现有的机器人通常遵循预先编程的路径，这使得它们不适合处理、检查和拆卸具有显著公差或可变性的部件。需要一种新的端到端方法，包括制造、工厂运输、零件对齐、零件跟踪和检测（包括表面形状计量和NDE），以及相关的大量数据管理，以满足质量和保证合规性流程。当我们将问题转化为再制造体系时，会出现完全相同的流程瓶颈，因此本提案采用了集成方法。再制造被认为是英国和全球市场经济增长的核心。由于资源和能源供应有限，向低碳经济过渡并强调资源效率是英国工业战略的关键。再制造可以通过防止浪费、改善资源管理、促进可持续经济增长、提高生产力和增强竞争力，对所有工业部门产生重大影响，从而支持这一转变。AIMaReM（制造和再制造中的自主检测）提供了数据收集、处理和可视化工具的独特组合，并结合了高效的机器人路径规划和避障功能，专注于制造检测（NDE和表面形状计量）。该项目将提供一个自动化的系统集成解决方案，这将直接有利于制造业，以实现更快的集成检测和零件处理，从而节省时间，降低成本，同时提高质量和产量。

High value manufacturing is an essential component of the UK economy, contributing strongly to our economic prosperity and engineering status around the world. The growth in high value manufacturing to support aerospace, nuclear and other high integrity engineering components, has placed huge pressure on the rapid delivery of reliable and high quality Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) to inspect these parts. Currently, much inspection of safety critical components (sometimes requiring 100% part inspection) is performed manually, leading to significant bottlenecks associated with the NDE. Existing robots typically follow pre-programmed paths making them unsuitable to handle, inspect and disassemble parts with a significant tolerance or variability. A new end-to-end approach is needed, embracing manufacture, transport through factory, parts alignment, parts tracking, and inspection (both surface form metrology and NDE) with the associated high volume data management feeding into the quality and assurance compliance processes.Exactly the same process bottlenecks occur when we translate the problem to the regime of Remanufacturing, hence the integrated approach taken through this proposal. Remanufacturing has been identified as being central to the creation of economic growth in the UK and global markets. With supplies of resources and energy limited, the transition to a low carbon economy with strong emphasis on resource efficiency is key to the UK's Industrial Strategy. Remanufacturing can support this transition by achieving significant impact in all industrial sectors through preventing waste, improving resource management, generating sustainable economic growth, increasing productivity and enhancing competitiveness.AIMaReM (Autonomous Inspection in Manufacturing& Remanufacturing) provides a unique combination of data collection, processing and visualisation tools combined with efficient robot path planning and obstacle avoidance, with a focus on manufacturing inspection (NDE and surface form metrology). The project will deliver an automated, systems integrated solution, that will be of direct benefit to the manufacturing sector to allow faster integrated inspection and parts handling, thus saving time, and reducing costs whilst enhancing quality and throughput.