CUHK Research: Changing the world

After rounds of searching and pitching by his students, a personal-care product company in mainland China, offered a helping hand. The company, which needed to frequently transport its products to another warehouse after packaging, was willing to let Professor Liu test the forklift prototype in its plants. “They bore with us when we had some technical glitches in the beginning and needed time to fix them. They were also our first customer. I am grateful.” Today, VisionNav Robotics is a leading global supplier of autonomous forklifts and intralogistics automation solutions. It serves more than 30 countries, with 60% of its business in mainland China and 40% overseas. Its robots are used by more than 50 Fortune 500 companies from the automotive, food, petrochemical, e-commerce, third-party logistics, pharmaceutical industries and other sectors. Surgery robots relieving doctors’ burden Another research area of Professor Liu is surgical robots. His team has developed surgical robots to assist doctors in sinus surgery and hysterectomy, which have undergone clinical trials at the Prince of Wales Hospital, CUHK’s largest teaching hospital. The team is now working on robots that can perform surgical procedures semi- automatically. “We hope robots can share doctors’ burden and take over some simple and tedious procedures such as stitching, injection and biopsy, so the doctors get less tired. Doctors will only need to monitor the surgery and press a ‘confirm’ button before the robot proceeds,” he says. Service robots for smart city Looking ahead, Professor Liu hopes to create robots to serve people’s needs in daily life such as in restaurants and hotels, as the service industry plays a key role in Hong Kong’s economy. His team has been working on increasing the flexibility and vision of the service robots with the robotic arms, so that they can take up tasks such as serving dishes in restaurants and folding blankets in hotel rooms. “Our technology has reached practical level. Now we are discussing collaboration possibilities with many business partners to identify scenarios that are suitable for deploying service robots.” Professor Liu joined CUHK in 1995 after studying and working in robotic science in Japan for 10 years. “CUHK has an open academic environment, a productive research community, a well-connected global network and deep integration and cooperation with the Greater Bay Area on the mainland,” he says. “These are all favourable conditions for us to continue scientific research.” Ifwarehouse tasks can be automated, and artificial intelligence can fill inwhere human decision-making is needed, the bottleneckcan be solved. 16