The 2024 China Textile Industry Federation Science and Technology Award was announced recently, and the "Ring spinning machine automatic joint robot and its collaborative intelligent system" project jointly completed by Donghua University, Wuxi Yi Cotton Textile Group Co., LTD., Jingwei Intelligent Textile Machinery Co., Ltd. won the first prize of the Technological Invention Award.
With the integration of artificial intelligence technology and manufacturing industry, robotized manufacturing has become a new trend of intelligent manufacturing. The development of the spinning industry to a new intelligent model needs to solve the "two-break" problem of the industry, that is, the breakpoint of the entire spinning process automation (automatic joint problem) and the breakpoint of the fiber flow at high speed (yarn breakage problem). The key to solve the two-break problem is: yarn robot joint technology.
The broken end of a tiny piece of yarn contains a major challenge in robotics. "Count" is a measure of the thickness of the yarn. For 120 grades, 1 gram of cotton can be made into 200 meters of yarn. The robot needs to complete 120 yarn joints, which need to be controlled precisely in the millimetre to achieve the ultimate "tenderness". Under the leadership of Professor Zhang Jie from Donghua University, the project team has overcome the flexible control, self-navigation movement control and multi-machine group intelligence cooperation of the spinning robot joint through continuous technological innovation, and completed the breakpoints of the entire spinning process automation, and made breakthroughs in the success rate and efficiency of 120 spinning joint core performance indicators.
The unremitting efforts and innovative achievements of the project team have won high recognition from experts. The expert group headed by Academician Xu Weilin unanimously agreed that the overall technology of the project has reached the international advanced level, among which the cruise joint robot technology is in the international leading position.
The ultimate goal of technological innovation is to incubate products and solve the pain points in actual production. In order to cross the valley of death from technology to product, the project formed a multi-disciplinary team.
Donghua University, formerly known as China Textile University, has a good foundation in textile intelligent manufacturing, especially in the automatic joint technology has a unique advantage. Wuxi Yimian is a textile enterprise with a hundred years of history, and it is also a leader in the intelligent textile industry. "We see Donghua University's scientific research team in solving the bottleneck problems in the first-class spirit and solid style, which coincides with the cotton textile industry to be the leader of the enterprise positioning." Therefore, we are determined to work closely with the Donghua team to overcome the difficulties." Said Zhou Ye-jun, former chairman of Wuxi Yilin.
In order to further promote the application, the project team introduced warp and weft intelligence. It is the eldest son of textile machinery in the Republic and occupies a leading position in the textile machinery market. The three units have formed a community of production, university and research, complementary advantages, overcome this industry problem, and laid a good foundation for promotion and application.
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Looking to the future: Enabling multi-scene innovative development
Flexible work robot technology is not only limited to textile industry, its technology can also be applied to automatic optical fiber welding, integrated circuit bonding leads and other scenarios. Through the promotion and application of common technology, the technology will empower optoelectronics, integrated circuits and other industries to promote their intelligent transformation.
In addition, the team also plans to further improve the intelligent robot system, deeply plant technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data analysis in smart factories, create a new model of robotized intelligent manufacturing, and lead the development of intelligent manufacturing technology. Under the development wave of embodied intelligence, humanoid robots and other technologies, intelligent manufacturing of multi-type robot crowd intelligence collaboration will become a reality in the near future.