Pai Zheng

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has a pivotal role in smart manufacturing for strict requirements of human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. However, existing HRC development mainly undertakes either a human-dominant or robot-dominant manner, where human and robotic agents reactively perform operations by following pre-defined instruction...

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has played a pivotal role in today’s human-centric smart manufacturing scenarios. Nevertheless, limited concerns have been given to HRC uncertainties. By integrating both human and artificial intelligence, this paper proposes a collaborative intelligence (CI)-based approach for handling three major types of HRC uncer...

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has escalated in notability in recent years, and multimodal communication and control strategies are necessitated to guarantee a secure, efficient, and intelligent HRI experience. In spite of the considerable focus on multimodal HRI, comprehensive disquisitions delineating various modalities and intricately analyzing t...

The emergence of large language models (LLM), like GPT, is revolutionizing the field of information retrieval, finding applications across a wide range of domains. However, the intricate domain knowledge and the unique software paradigms inherent to the manufacturing sector have posed significant barriers to the effective utilization of LLM. To add...

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has emerged as a pivot in contemporary human-centric smart manufacturing scenarios. However, the fulfilment of HRC tasks in unstructured scenes brings many challenges to be overcome. In this work, mixed reality head-mounted display is modelled as an effective data collection, communication, and state representation i...

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is set to transform the manufacturing paradigm by leveraging the strengths of human flexibility and robot precision. The recent breakthrough of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has motivated the preliminary explorations and adoptions of these models in the smart manufacturing field. Howe...

The manipulation of deformable objects by robotic systems presents significant challenges due to their complex dynamics and infinite-dimensional configuration spaces. This article introduces a novel approach to deformable object manipulation (DOM) by emphasizing the introduction and manipulation of structures of interest (SOIs) in deformable fabric...

The evolution of smart vehicle cockpits is transitioning from serving as mere driving tools to becoming intimate partners that significantly enhance user experiences through advanced technologies. This research addresses the growing demand for personalized design in smart vehicle cockpits by proposing a framework, CockpitGemini. This framework inte...

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is key to achieving the flexible automation required by the mass personalization trend, especially towards human-centric intelligent manufacturing. Nevertheless, existing HRC systems suffer from poor task understanding and poor ergonomic satisfaction, which impede empathetic teamwork skills in task execution. To over...

Human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience are becoming core values in modern manufacturing, with human–robot collaboration (HRC) in high demand for flexible automation. However, human–robotic swarms are typically designed to target one specific procedure and cannot fully share their autonomy. The Metaverse, characterized by socialized avatar...

Human motion prediction is crucial for facilitating human–robot collaboration in customized assembly tasks. However, existing research primarily focuses on predicting limited human motions using static global information, which fails to address the highly stochastic nature of customized assembly operations in a given region. To address this, we pro...

Fault isolation, or fault location, aims to identify anomalous components at the start of the maintenance process. However, fault isolation within complex equipment can be challenging due to constraints on the scarcity of labeled data and the intricate interaction among various substructures. To overcome this challenge, an embedding-based Bayesian...

The rapid development of advanced technologies provides futuristic option to enhance product value with digital services, which the concept of Smart Product-Service System (SPSS) was proposed. SPSS focuses on usage data, the whole lifecycle, and the iterative optimisation. A large amount of data and context information can be collected during the u...

Inductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer the missing relation for a set of newly-coming entities that never appeared in the training set. Such a setting is more in line with reality, as real-world KGs are constantly evolving and introducing new knowledge. Recent studies have shown promising results using message passing over subgrap...

Proactive Human–Robot Collaboration Toward Human-Centric Smart Manufacturing is driven by an appreciation of manufacturing scenarios where human and robotic agents can understand each other's actions and conduct mutual-cognitive, predictable, and self-organizing teamwork. Modern factories’ smart manufacturing transformation and the evolution of rel...

The integration of human-robot collaboration yields substantial benefits, particularly in terms of enhancing flexibility and efficiency within a range of mass-personalized manufacturing tasks, for example, small-batch customized product inspection and assembly/disassembly. Meanwhile, as human-robot collaboration lands broader in manufacturing, the...

The increasing complexity of industrial systems demands more effective and intelligent maintenance approaches to address manufacturing defects arising from faults in multiple asset modules. Traditional digital twin (DT) systems, however, face limitations in interoperability, knowledge sharing, and causal inference. As such, cognitive digital twins...

With the continuous development of human-centric, resilient, and sustainable manufacturing towards Industry 5.0, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gradually unveiled new opportunities for additional functionalities, new features, and tendencies in the industrial landscape. On the other hand, the technology-driven Industry 4.0 paradigm is still in fu...

Smart product-service systems (Smart PSS), first coined in 2014 as a digital servitization paradigm, have experienced rapid development, especially in the past 5 years. Nevertheless, existing works still concern much on either the solution design principles or the service-dominant logic, while neglecting today's dramatic shift towards a human-objec...

Thermal error modeling (TEM) is essential for preserving machining accuracy and enhancing the reliability of electric spindle systems. However, the major challenges in TEM lie in the limited or unavailable labeled thermal error samples due to the difficulties in data acquisition, as well as the problem of large distribution discrepancy between trai...

The fast development of AI-based approaches for image recognition has driven the availability of fast and reliable tools for identifying the human body in captured videos (both 2D and 3D). This has increased the feasibility and effectiveness of approaches for human pose estimation in industrial environments. This essay will cover different approach...

Human-centricity, a core value of Industry 5.0, places humans in the center of production. It leads to the prioritization of human needs, spanning from health and safety to self-actualization and personal growth. The concept of the Human Digital Twin (HDT) is proposed as a critical method to realize human-centricity in smart manufacturing systems t...

Vision-based quality inspection is a key step to ensure the quality control of complex industrial products. However, accurate defect recognition for complex products with information-rich, structure-irregular and significantly different patterns is still a tough problem, since it causes the strong visual interference. This paper proposes a causal d...

Human-robot collaborative disassembly (HRCD) has gained much interest in the disassembly tasks of end-of-life products, integrating both robot’s high efficiency in repetitive works and human’s flexibility with higher cognition. Explicit human-object perceptions are significant but remain little reported in the literature for adaptive robot decision...

Journal of Engineering Design, Special Issue https://www.tandfonline.com/action/newsAndOffers?journalCode=cjen20 To contribute to this issue, submissions in the following topics, but are not limited to, are highly encouraged: Advances in cognitive intelligence fundamentals/theories Knowledge extraction/representation for cognitive intelligence Kno...

Cutting parameter optimisation is an effective way to realise energy-efficient machining. In previous studies, the cutting parameters of machining features of turning, milling, grinding, drilling, hobbing, and threading were optimised to decrease energy consumed by machine tools, and considerable energy savings were achieved. However, the energy co...

Data-driven approaches have been widely applied in fault diagnosis. However, having sufficient labels to effectively develop fault diagnosis models in real-world manufacturing scenarios has remained a challenge. The key issue is to break down data silos and expand the source of data availability while safeguarding data privacy. To address abovement...

This paper pioneers the use of the extreme learning machine (ELM) approach for surface roughness prediction in ultra-precision milling, leveraging the excellent fitting ability with small datasets and the fast learning speed of the extreme learning machine method. By providing abundant machining information, the machining parameters and force signa...

In the conceptual design and early embodiment design stages, an effective kinematic prototype can assist indetecting design errors, minimizing unnecessary parameter modifications, and optimizing subsequent resourcedeployment. Existing methods for creating prototypes, such as 2D sketches, 3D modelling, or analysis software,have their advantages in p...

This Special Issue serves as a bridge between the ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering (JMSE) and the global community of manufacturing researchers. Its primary objective is to curate a collection of high-level scientific articles that push the boundaries of knowledge in the realm of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) for forward-look...

Smart manufacturing systems typically consist of multiple machines with different processing durations. The continuous monitoring of these machines produces multiple time-series process data (MTPD), which have four characteristics: low data value density, diverse data dimensions, transmissible processing states, and complex coupling relationships....

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is showing the potential of widespread application in today’s humancentric smart manufacturing, as prescribed by Industry 5.0. To enable safe and efficient collaboration, numerous visual perception methods have been explored, which allows the robot to perceive surroundings and plan collision-free, reactive manipulati...

Welding radiographic image defect segmentation (WRIDS) is a key technology to promote the automation and standardization of quality inspection. However, the complexity of scale variability, aggregation and contextual relationships presented by welding defects pose a great challenge to WRIDS, such as porosity, slag and lack of penetration. To addres...

The development of advanced information technologies are paving the digital transformation of manufacturing systems, of which Digital Twin-based manufacturing system (DTMS) has become a prevailing topic attracted ever-increasing concerns from both industry and academia. As a cutting-edge smart manufacturing system, DTMS can improve manufacturing ac...

Smart product-service system (Smart PSS), as an emerging digital servitization paradigm, has attracted strong interest from both industry and academia worldwide. Compared with traditional PSS, Smart PSS has three unique characteristics, namely context awareness, closed-loop design, and IT-driven value co-creation, which put forward higher requireme...

The automatic inspection of surface defects is an important task for quality control in the computers, communications, and consumer electronics (3C) industry. Conventional devices for defect inspection (viz. line-scan sensors) have a limited field of view, thus, a robot-aided defect inspection system needs to scan the object from multiple viewpoint...

The combination of Augmented Reality (AR) and Digital Twin (DT) has begun to show its potential nowadays, leading to a growing research interest in both academia and industry. Especially under the currenthuman-centric trend, AR embraces the potential to integrate operators into the new generation of Human-Cyber–Physical System (HCPS), in which DT i...

Multiple Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) requires self-organising task allocation to adapt to varying operation goals and workspace changes. However, nowadays an HRC system relies on predefined task arrangements for human and robot agents, which fails to accomplish complicated manufacturing tasks consisting of various operation sequences and differ...

Advances in the Internet, communication technologies, and computation power have accelerated the cycle of new product development as well as supply chain efficiency in an unprecedented manner. Digital technology provides not only an important means for the optimization of production efficiency through simulations prior to the start of actual operat...

With the increasing demand for customization, the tendency of mechanical manufacturing has gradually shifted to flexible and mixed-line production, which brings new challenges to the existing scheduling pattern. As an indispensable part, logistics is responsible for establishing connections among various production equipment and processes. Meanwhil...

The joint optimisation of product design configuration (PDC) for new and remanufactured products involves specification upgrading for parts recovered from used product returns. Reversely, the specification upgrading decision for used parts/modules is also affected by the original specifications selected for parts/modules during the new product desi...

The reliability and accuracy of welding image recognition (WIR) is critical, which can largely improve domain experts’ insight of the welding system. To ensure its performance, deep learning (DL), as the cutting-edge artificial intelligence technique, has been prevailingly studied and adopted to empower intelligent WIR in various industry implement...

Due to its excellent che