PI: Mooi Choo Chuah
Co-PI: Aparna Bharati
University: Lehigh University
Industry partner: FLX Solutions, Inc.
Every year key infrastructure across the United States falls further into disrepair. There is a need to rapidly inspect, maintain, and upgrade these systems. FLX Solutions, Inc., a PA Keystone Innovation Zone and Ben Franklin corporation, builds robots to minimize interruptions in manufacturing and other industry facilities. The FLX BOT is a patented, one-inch diameter snake-like robot that revolutionizes preventative maintenance by making it possible for technicians to reach and service areas that were previously inaccessible.
A key outcome of this PITA grant is the development of a vision language model-guided module for the mobile platform that incorporates the FLX BOT that we developed last year. This module will allow workers in large manufacturing plants and heavy machinery plants to use voice instructions to more easily inspect hard-to-reach components, such as underneath the conveyor systems. This is a critical need expressed by industry inspectors to have robotic inspection systems that not only can detect faults with higher accuracy and improve workers’ efficiency but are also affordable. We will also include a dialogue module that allows human operators to record notes regarding damaged components in captured images for later analysis. In addition, we will further improve the movable structure we designed to host the FLX BOT on the mobile platform so that it can be more stable when operating in sharp angle changes. This project is a collaboration between research and industry through a partnership between the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University and FLX Solutions. The results of the project will enable FLX Solutions to better address their customer needs through an affordable mobile platform with the FLX BOT to revolutionize the efficacy and efficiency of infrastructure inspection processes.