China: 70-year-old Chinese turbine company blows into future with AI production line.

Storyline 70-year-old Chinese turbine company blows into future with AI production line The winds of change are in full blast at a 70-year-old steam turbine company in Shanghai. Shanghai Turbine Works has just installed a brand-new AI production line that's helped improve efficiency. With so-called "flexible operations", one line can process many different types of blades at the same time. Ye Li'ang, Director, Technical Management Office of Blade Center, Shanghai Turbine Works: "The basic principle of the entire production line is that, through a robotic arm combined with a self-developed vision algorithm, it identifies various types of blades, performs recognition, positioning, and grasping for loading. It has more than 1,900 built-in rules, and internally there is also AI learning from the scheduling experience and results of our masters from before. It will repeatedly iterate and evolve." According to the company, the robotic arm's recognition and grasping is about 99.9 percent accurate. With annual blade production topping 300,000, based on thousands of different blade models, the new AI system is expected to reduce the number of production planners from seven or eight to just two. Zhuang Weifeng, Chief Team Leader, Production Management Office of Blade Center, Shanghai Turbine Works: "This blade has relatively high precision requirements. It includes all the processing content of the lathe and milling machine inside. We need to feed this knowledge to AI, feed it to the robot, so that it can thoroughly master my skills. The robot is like a new robot apprentice." The company says that with a shortened and more accurate inspection processes, their steam turbine blade production capacity has increased by 60 percent. [Restrictions: No access Chinese mainland]