Task-Specified Active Metrological Inspection

Why it matters

From a high-mix part family and its specifications, through inspection programming and metrology, to visible, partially occluded and hidden features, task decomposition, and the dual-arm cell executing the inspection to a pass decision.

Why Task-Specified Active Inspection?

High-mix, low-volume manufacturing introduces frequent changes in parts, specifications, and inspection requests, making repeated inspection programming difficult to scale. Accurate sensing alone is insufficient: the system must also determine what to measure, actively expose hidden features, and verify that the required evidence is complete. FRAME addresses this challenge by transforming an instruction and structured specification into a closed-loop sequence of observation, scanning, and reorientation, followed by a deterministic, evidence-based conformance decision.

How it works

System overview: a specification-constrained task manager dispatches to a measurement expert and a manipulation expert, each behind a gate, over a shared inspection state, with a coverage audit feeding a conformance evaluator.

Method Overview

FRAME separates task reasoning, physical access, and metrological verification into explicit roles. A specification-constrained task manager translates the instruction and specification into inspection requirements, then coordinates two specialized experts. The manipulation expert observes and reorients the part to expose requested regions, while the measurement expert acquires calibrated line profiles and computes geometric quantities. Their outputs pass through correspondence and admissibility gates before entering a shared inspection state that records physical-to-specification correspondence, measurement provenance, and evidence coverage. If coverage is incomplete, the task manager continues the inspection loop; only complete, admissible evidence is passed to the deterministic conformance evaluator for the final report and sorting decision.

Citation

Citing This Work

@misc{chen2026taskspecifiedactivemetrologicalinspection,
      title={Task-Specified Active Metrological Inspection with Measurement-Steered VLA Manipulation and Deterministic Evidence Gating}, 
      author={Zhiling Chen and Jingzhan Ge and Ruimin Chen and Matthew P. Castanier and David Gorsich and Farhad Imani},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2609.14219},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14219}, 
}