Bulletin No. 2, 2024

Professor Liu Yunhui has been devoted to building robots his whole career. His innovations in industrial robots have marked milestones in robotics at CUHK, most notably the vision-based autonomous forklift his team developed in 2016, which has been deployed by warehouses around the world and helped his startup grow into a unicorn. In recent years, Professor Liu’s team has focused on developing innovative products and applications for 3D vision-driven robots in various domains, including smart factories, smart warehouses and smart cities, aiming to make them smart enough to operate not just in industrial contexts, but also in the service industry, where environments are more dynamic, sometimes with humans around. These 3D vision-driven robots should have good eye-brain- motion coordination like humans, responsive to changes, he says. “An ordinary robot does not have eyes. You need to teach it how to walk, how to pick up an object and then come back – it keeps repeating these steps. It does not have human intelligence,” Professor Liu explains. “In some industrial settings and in service industries, there are people around and the environment is full of uncertainties. The tasks required are not so repetitive. This gives rise to safety problems.” 3D Vision-Driven Picking Station in a real warehouse 19