Programming robots to perform complex tasks is a very expensive job. Traditional path planning and control are able to generate point to point collision free trajectories, but when the tasks to be performed are complex, traditional planning and control become complex tasks. This study focused on robotic operations in logistics, specifically, on picking objects in unstructured areas using a mobile manipulator configuration. The mobile manipulator has to be able to place its base in a correct place so the arm is able to plan a trajectory up to an object in a table. A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach was selected to solve this type of complex control tasks. Using the arm planner’s feedback, a controller for the robot base is learned, which guides the platform to such a place where the arm is able to plan a trajectory up to the object. In addition the performance of two DRL algorithms ((Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)) and (Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO)) is compared within the context of a concrete robotic task.

Surface defect identification is an essential task in the industrial quality control process, in which visual checks are conducted on a manufactured product to ensure that it meets quality standards. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based surface defect identification method has proven to outperform traditional image processing techniques. However, the real-world surface defect datasets are limited in size due to the expensive data generation process and the rare occurrence of defects. To address this issue, this paper presents a method for exploiting auxiliary information beyond the primary labels to improve the generalization ability of surface defect identification tasks. Considering the correlation between pixel level segmentation masks, object level bounding boxes and global image level classification labels, we argue that jointly learning features of the related tasks can improve the performance of surface defect identification tasks. This paper proposes a framework named Defect-Aux-Net, based on multi-task learning with attention mechanisms that exploit the rich additional information from related tasks with the goal of simultaneously improving robustness and accuracy of the CNN based surface defect identification. We conducted a series of experiments with the proposed framework. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of state-of-the-art models while achieving an overall accuracy of 97.1%, Dice score of 0.926 and mAP of 0.762 on defect classification, segmentation and detection tasks.

Maintenance tasks are crucial for all kind of industries, especially in extensive industrial plants, like solar thermal power plants. The incorporation of robots is a key issue for automating inspection activities, as it will allow a constant and regular control over the whole plant. This paper presents an autonomous robotic system to perform pipeline inspection for early detection and prevention of leakages in thermal power plants, based on the work developed within the MAINBOT (http://www.mainbot.eu) European project. Based on the information provided by a thermographic camera, the system is able to detect leakages in the collectors and pipelines. Beside the leakage detection algorithms, the system includes a particle filter-based tracking algorithm to keep the target in the field of view of the camera and to avoid the irregularities of the terrain while the robot patrols the plant. The information provided by the particle filter is further used to command a robot arm, which handles the camera and ensures that the target is always within the image. The obtained results show the suitability of the proposed approach, adding a tracking algorithm to improve the performance of the leakage detection system.