Recently, the Henan Provincial Department of Education issued the "Notice on Announcing the List of Projects for the 2021 College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program", and the innovation and entrepreneurship projects of college students of Zhengzhou Aviation Academy have achieved fruitful results, and a total of 19 national-level college students' innovation and entrepreneurship training programs and 32 provincial-level projects have been approved. Sohu, Sina, Today's Headlines, Top News, Elephant News, Zhengzhou Evening News client, Phoenix Network, Dahe News, etc. have paid attention to and reported on this.
Among them, the "airport runway foreign object intelligent detection and cleaning unmanned vehicle" was approved as a project in the key support areas of the national college students innovation and entrepreneurship training plan. As one of the outstanding innovation and entrepreneurship achievements of the university's college students, the project was simultaneously selected as a display project of the 2021 Mass Entrepreneurship And Innovation Activity Week, and exhibited in the Star Twinkling College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Block, which was favored by many investors.
"Airport runway foreign object intelligent detection and cleaning unmanned vehicle"
Project details
Zhang Conghui, a 2019 student in the School of Materials Science of Zhengzhou Institute of Aeronautical Industry Management, led the team to develop the idea of "hornbill bird robot", stemming from her understanding of the dangers of FOD on a piece of news. "Bird strikes can pose a hidden danger to the safety of aircraft navigation, but few people know that FOD (Note: Foreign Object Debris, which refers to a foreign substance, debris or object that may damage an aircraft) has a similar impact on aircraft safety."
Inhaling FOD during the operation of the aircraft engine will not only make the engine fail, but also accumulate in the aircraft machinery, affecting the operation of equipment such as landing gear and flaps. After consulting the relevant literature, Zhang Conghui wanted to do something in the airport runway FOD cleaning, so he organized a team in his spare time, and the team name was "FOD Terminator".
Team research found that at present, most of the domestic airports on the FOD detection and cleaning is done manually, this method is unreliable, inefficient, but also occupies valuable runway use time, and sometimes even temporarily close the runway, reduce flight capacity.
Although the team has determined the research direction, there are still many difficulties in front of the innovation team, and the first thing to be solved is the problem that the accuracy of millimeter-wave radar detection is not high. At this stage, the radar on the market is divided into meter-wave radar, centimeter-wave radar and millimeter-wave radar, in order to obtain higher detection accuracy, the team initially chose the millimeter-wave radar with the highest detection accuracy, but the test found that due to technical barriers, the millimeter-wave radar accuracy on the market is not enough to fully detect FOD, which has become a technical problem that the team urgently needs to solve.
Thankfully, the different disciplinary backgrounds of the team members played a role. After reading a large number of literature on image recognition technology, members from the School of Art and Design proposed to use OpenCV (Note: a computer vision and machine learning software library) to write image recognition programs, and combine image recognition programs with millimeter-wave radar to maximize the detection effect.
After months of trial and error, the FOD Terminator team designed a FOD detection and cleaning robot that combined detection and cleaning of the airport runway, named "Hornbill Bird", and created a model according to the life size 3:1. "Don't look at a model that is only one-third the size, its detection and cleaning functions are not lacking at all." Zhang Conghui said.
The Hornbill Robot adopts automated detection technology and hybrid airport runway foreign object detection system, including the combination and feedback of radar technology and computer vision technology to locate and determine FOD, and will gradually replace the original manual inspection method in the future.
Project achievements
The Terminator team's robots have won many awards for their advanced ideas. At present, the project has won the second prize of the 2020 "Challenge Cup" Henan University Students Entrepreneurship Plan Competition, the second prize of the 2021 Henan "Internet +" College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition and the 7th China International "Internet +" College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition Henan Division Selection Competition, and has been approved as a project in the key support areas of the national university students innovation and entrepreneurship training program, and has applied for a utility model patent.
A recent test result showed that in a laboratory environment, the robot can recognize and clean 98% of the FOD; at the same time, the team designed four generations of product drawings, produced two generations of models, and realized the upgrading of the product.
Not only that, but the FOD Terminator team is also actively exploring the commercialization path of the project. A company has signed a letter of intent for project investment with the team, after analysis, the market price of mature robots in the future is about 500,000 yuan, of which the net profit is about 200,000 yuan, if it is placed in major airports in China, the profit is quite considerable. "It's going to be a big blue ocean market." Zhang Conghui said. At present, her team has a clear goal, that is, to continue to exert efforts in technology, to do a good job in a new generation of products, to contribute more to the early realization of productization, and to contribute more to FOD detection and cleaning.
In recent years, through the establishment of special funds, the recognition of innovation and entrepreneurship credits and alternative elective course credits, the strengthening of process supervision, strict acceptance of projects and other incentives and supervision measures, the school has continued to promote project construction, improve project quality, expand the coverage of the plan, so that the influence of the university students' innovation and entrepreneurship training program in teachers and students continues to increase, effectively stimulating students' innovative thinking, creative vitality and innovation and entrepreneurship ability, has become a bearing project for cultivating high-quality double creation achievements and innovative and entrepreneurial talents in the school.