Due to the high risks of manual labor in the steel industry, there is a growing demand for robot-based solutions to replace traditional manpower. Steel companies aim to reduce on-site personnel, minimize accidents, and enhance productivity. This study develops a robotic system to monitor conveyors in ironmaking and detect potential bearing failures. Rollers on belt conveyors contain bearings that emit abnormal noise when worn or damaged. Traditional manual inspection requires workers to approach each roller and listen directly, posing safety risks and inefficiencies. The proposed system detects faulty bearings more quickly and accurately by localizing abnormal sounds. The system comprises a manipulator with a microphone on its end-effector. The microphone collects sound along the conveyor as the manipulator moves to detect noise sources. Once an abnormal bearing is located, faster and more accurate maintenance becomes possible. This robotbased inspection method improves safety, inspection speed, and productivity.
Accurate localization in industrial environments is challenging due to factors such as dust and reflections that degrade perception. To overcome these limitations, we propose an environment-independent localization method that relies solely on ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning. Our system employs LiDAR-SLAM in an offline stage to create a global map frame and calibrate the transformation between this frame and the UWB anchors. During operation, the robot estimates its position using a Kalman filter applied to UWB measurements transformed into the map frame. This paper presents a preliminary feasibility study conducted in an office-like environment to verify the core calibration and localization pipeline. The results show that the proposed method effectively aligns UWB positions with a pre-built SLAM map, achieving a 94% reduction in root-mean-square error (RMSE) compared to raw UWB measurements when validated against LiDAR-SLAM ground truth. This initial verification establishes the technical viability of the framework and lays the groundwork for future validation in harsh, large-scale industrial settings.
A pneumatic tube system is a system that transmits and receives objects quickly inside pipes and is used in urgent situations or when transferring or returning objects. It is mainly used in hospitals, large marts, and automation systems. For long-distance transportation (up to 10 km) high pressure is used at industrial plant industrial sites. A large amount of flow rate and high pressure are used to generate instantaneous pressure and flow to the opposite side, where the transport target is stored in a separately manufactured carrier and transported. Specially manufactured carriers considering significant frictional force in the straight, curved, rising, and lower sections during long-distance transport are employed. The other party experimentally generates reverse pressure to lower the care speed inside the transfer pipe that arrives at a high speed and operates the worker valve to reduce the speed, but the valve must be operated every time according to pressure and distance changes. In the present work, a method of arriving at a carrier in a stable pipe through speed reduction by controlling the flow rate and reverse pressure depending on the distance from the transmission unit and calculating the reverse pressure compared to the teleportation speed is presented.