Adaptive acquisition planning for visual inspection in remanufacturing using reinforcement learning

Abstract

In remanufacturing, humans perform visual inspection tasks manually. In doing so, human inspectors implicitly solve variants of visual acquisition planning problems. Nowadays, solutions to these problems are computed based on the object geometry of the object to be inspected. In remanufacturing, however, there are often many product variants, and the existence of geometric object models cannot be assumed. This makes it difficult to plan and solve visual acquisition planning problems for the automated execution of visual inspection tasks. Reinforcement learning offers the possibility of learning and reproducing human inspection behavior and solving the visual inspection problem, even for problems in which no object geometry is available. To investigate reinforcement learning as a solution, a simple simulation environment is developed, allowing the execution of reproducible and controllable experiments. Different reinforcement learning agent modeling alternatives are developed and compared for solving the derived visual planning problems. The results of this work show that reinforcement learning agents can solve the derived visual planning problems in use cases without available object geometry by using domain-specific prior knowledge. Our proposed framework is available open source under the following link: https://github.com/Jarrypho/View-Planning-Simulation.