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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 chemical and mechanical properties, silicone sealing has been widely used in many industries. Currently, the majority of these sealing tasks are performed by human workers. Hence, they are susceptible to labor shortage problems. The use of vision-guided robotic systems is a feasible alternative to automate these types of repeti...

In line with the human centricity characteristics of the emerging Industry 5.0 paradigm, manual assembly has long been an indispensable element of the small-batch and customized products. Nevertheless, the flexibility of manual operations is prone to assembly errors caused by human uncertainties. Since the newly assembled part directly determines t...

The rapid implementation of the third-wave of IT innovation (e.g. smart, connected products, Internet-of-Things (IoT)) and the fourth Industrial Revolution (e.g. advanced operation technologies (OTs), Cyber-Physical Systems) have enabled the prevailing industrial digital transformation (i.e. digitalization), where OT and IT are integrated in an Ind...

Maintenance planning is a significant part of predictive maintenance, which involves task planning, resource scheduling, and prevention. With large-scale sensor systems in modern factories, much data will be captured during monitoring and maintenance of complex industrial equipment. Accumulated data facilitates maintenance planning becomes more tho...

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme (JRS) aims to promote collaboration between researchers / research teams in Hong Kong and the Mainland on the basis of complementing existing strengths of both sides. It also offers up to two conference grants to sponsor...

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has been identified as a highly promising paradigm for human-centric smart manufacturing in the context of Industry 5.0. In order to enhance both human well-being and robotic flexibility within HRC, numerous research efforts have been dedicated to the exploration of human body perception, but many of these studies ha...

Non-destructive testing of welds based on the radiographic image is crucial for improving the reliability of aerospace structural components. The deep learning method represented by the convolutional neural network (CNN) has received extensive attention in welding radiographic image recognition (WRIR) owing to its powerful feature adaptive extracti...

Welding radiographic image analysis (WRIA) is a key technology for welding automated non-destructive testing. Although there already exist some valuable surveys on WRIA, they do not provide a systematic overview of the challenges faced by WRIA and lack a careful distinction and comparison of the core feature techniques in WRIA. With the rapid devel...

In modern manufacturing, the interaction and symbiosis between humans and the industrial robot are one of the foci of smart manufacturing. During human-robot interaction(HRI), the potential risk of any injury to workers caused by industrial robots is very critical and should be well-addressed to ensure manufacturing safety. However, in the dynamic...

In line with human-centric smart manufacturing, modern factories are striving for an ever-higher degree of flexible and resilient production, as the conventional automation approach has reached its bottleneck considering mass personalization with increasing complicatedness and complexity. To achieve it, human-robot collaboration (HRC) becomes a pre...

Globally, advanced manufacturing industries are transitioning from technology-driven to value-driven development. These industries are prominent in using innovative technologies to create and improve existing products by capitalizing on existing and foreseeable ICT infrastructure in areas such as automation, computation, informatization, and digita...

This work proposed a strategy for fabricating intelligent continuous fiber-reinforced lattice structures (CFRLSs) for reusable energy absorption applications based on the cold-programming-induced shape memory effect. By integrating the smart material with continuous fiber, the CFRLSs can not only dissipate a considerable amount of energy but also r...

Digital twin (DT) technology can realize the quality control of the dynamic cutting process by establishing the high-fidelity DT model, which has gradually become a hot spot in intelligent machining. Although some review articles have focused on DT, there is still a lack of clear and systematic analysis of DT-driven machining. To bridge this gap, t...

To facilitate the personalized smart manufacturing paradigm with cognitive automation capabilities, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has attracted ever-increasing attention by offering an adaptive and flexible solution. DRL takes the advantages of both Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), by embracing the power of representa...

Recognizing sitting posture is significant to prevent the development of work-related musculoskeletal disorders for office workers. Multimodal data, i.e., infrared map and pressure map, have been leveraged to achieve accurate recognition while preserving privacy and being unobtrusive for daily use. Existing studies in sitting posture recognition ut...

Enabled by advanced data analytics and intelligent computing, augmented reality head-up displays (AR-HUDs) are appraised with a certain degree of intelligence towards an in-car assistance system providing more convenience for drivers and ensuring safer traffic. Nevertheless, current AR-HUDs systems fail to analyze perceptual results with recommende...

Transactions of the ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering

Batch machining systems are essential for improving productivity and quality, but they consume considerable amounts of energy due to the continuous interaction with machine tools, workpieces, and cutting tools. In contrast to single-piece machining that has a short production cycle, the tool wear impacts in batch machining systems on energy consump...

Vision-based molten pool/keyhole (MPK) defect recognition is essential for online monitoring of laser welding quality. However, the visual differences corresponding to different MPK states are extremely small, which especially brings great challenges to the recognition of defect subclasses. In this paper, an attention-based bilinear feature extract...

RAIDS are open to young talents who are keen to conduct Ph.D. study or research activities as RA/Postdoc/Visiting Scholar in the relevant topics. We seek students with a good academic background in Industrial Engineering, Computer Science, Control and Automation, or Mechanical Engineering. Our research requires excellent mathematical, programming,...

PolyU students’ robot project shines in major technology competitions: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/publications/excelximpact/issue/202212/polyu-community/polyu-students-robot-project-shines-in-major-technology-competitions THE Campus: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/tactics-leading-and-engaging-students-research-competitions

In human-robot collaborative (HRC) manufacturing systems, how the collaborative robots engage in the collaborative tasks and complete the corresponding work in a timely manner according to the actual state has been a critical factor that hinders the efficiency of HRC. Inappropriate collaborative behaviors will result in a poor perceptual experience...

Digital twin technology has been gradually explored and applied in the machining process. A digital twin machining system creates high-fidelity virtual entities of physical entities to observe, analyze, and control the machining process in real-time. However, the current digital twin machining systems lack sufficient adaptability because they are u...

Timely and accurate fault diagnosis plays a critical role in today’s smart manufacturing practices, saving invaluable time and expenditure on maintenance process. To date, numerous data-driven approaches have been introduced for equipment fault diagnosis, and part of them attempt to involve equipment knowledge in their data-driven models. However,...

Nowadays, manufacturing enterprises are struggling to satisfy personalized and dynamic user requirements. Smart Product-service System (Smart PSS), as a promising and sustainable business model, can respond to personalized and dynamic demands through effective configuration/reconfiguration processes. Mass personalization (MP), which emphasizes dive...

Data-driven design (D3), a new design paradigm benefited from advanced data analytics and computational intelligence, has gradually promoted the research of data-driven product design (DDPD) ever since 2000 s. In today’s Intelligence Age, some theoretical and practical studies have tried to achieve the advanced intelligence capabilities in DDPD. Ho...

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has been considered as a promising paradigm towards futuristic human-centric smart manufacturing, to meet the thriving needs of mass personalization. In this context, existing robotic systems normally adopt a single-granularity semantic segmentation scheme for environment perception, which lacks the flexibility to be...

The rapid development of information and communication technologies has facilitated machining condition monitoring toward a data-driven paradigm, of which industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) serves as the fundamental basis to acquire data from physical equipment with sensing technologies as well as to learn the relationship between the system cond...

3D printing has drawn tremendous attention in Industry 4.0. Nowadays, with the ever-increasing consumers' requests for 3D printing services, there lies a big challenge to eliminate the unbalanced demands and supplies of 3D printing resources in a geographically distributed environment. Cloud manufacturing, as a newly emerged service-oriented manufa...

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...

Industry 5.0 blows the whistle on global industrial transformation. It aims to place humans' well-being at the center of manufacturing systems, thereby achieving social goals beyond employment and growth to provide prosperity robustly for the sustainable development of all humanity. However, the current exploration of Industry 5.0 is still in its i...

Human-robot collaborative (HRC) assembly combines the advantages of robot's operation consistency with human's cognitive ability and adaptivity, which provides an efficient and flexible way for complex assembly tasks. In the process of HRC assembly, the robot needs to understand the operator's intention accurately to assist the collaborative assemb...

Data-driven prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) has emerged as one of the most sought-after research in prognostics and health management (PHM). Nevertheless, most RUL prediction methods based on deep learning are black-box models that lack a visual interpretation to understand the RUL degradation process. To remedy the deficiency, we propose...

This special session aims to present the state-of-the-art approaches, tools, systems, and practical cases of HDT toward HCPS, including the following topics, but are not limited to: • Theory, investigation, survey, and review of HDT for HCPS • HDT in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) • Big data analytics for HDT • Data management and data policies in...

In practical machine fault diagnosis, the obtained data samples under faulty conditions are usually far less than those under normal conditions, resulting in a class-imbalanced dataset issue. The existing solutions for class-imbalanced scenarios include data-level and model-level strategies which are either subject to over-generalization or time-co...

With the emergence of Industry 5.0, the human-centric manufacturing paradigm requires manufacturingequipment (robots, etc.) interactively assist human workers to deal with dynamic and complex production tasks. To achieve symbiotic human–robot interaction (HRI), the safety issue serves as a prerequisite foundation.Regarding the growing individualize...

This special session aims to present state-of-the-art approaches, tools, systems, and cases to explore more applications of AR-assisted DT for futuristic smart manufacturing. To contribute to those areas, this special session includes the following topics, but are not limited to: • AR-assisted cognitive DT • AR-assisted DT for on-demand fabrication...

Industrial smart product-service systems (ISPS2) is a complex and dynamic ICT-based ecosystem of value co-creation among stakeholders, making the ISPS2 implementation a demanding and risky process. Previous studies often use Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) approach to identify potential risks of failure modes to ensure successful implemen...

Data‐driven fault diagnosis approaches have been widely adopted due to their persuasive performance. However, data are always insufficient to develop effective fault diagnosis models in real manufacturing scenarios. Despite numerous approaches that have been offered to mitigate the negative effects of insufficient data, the most challenging issue l...

Cognitive intelligence-enabled manufacturing (CoIM) uses machines to utilize technologies that mimic human cognitive abilities to solve complex problems in manufacturing. With the support of a cognitive intelligence-enabled manufacturing system (CoIMS) architecture, information flow is organized and coordinated appropriately, starting from the mach...

In line with the human-centric concerns of Industry 5.0, modern factories are striving for an ever-higher degree of flexible and resilient production in mass personalization with increasing complicatedness and complexity. To achieve it, human-robot collaboration (HRC) becomes a prevailing strategy, which combines high accuracy, strength, and repeat...

Goal: Advanced manufacturing industries worldwide are revolutionizing from technology-driven to value-driven development, where ICT infrastructure built upon the automation, informatization and digitalization process has gradually become a common setting in manufacturing companies. Due to the data-rich and knowledge-intensive nature, manufacturing...