Enabling Industrial Robots for Manufacturing through AI Techniques

Globally, there is strong social inequality because of a complex ecosystem of production of goods and services, a global recession and contraction of markets. It is a multifactorial problem that involves geopolitical problems such as the war in Ukraine or the supply of semiconductors, to name just a few examples. The global labour shortage is widely recognised, and it has been the central focus of discussions at the recent World Economic Forum. This lack of labour is mainly due to the post-pandemic period, retirements, or early retirements. The effect is global and is observed in the lack of personnel in the primary sector in the case of Chile and in the manufacturing industry in the case of Mexico. To address this problem, it is necessary to increase production capacities both in the primary sector in Chile and in the manufacturing industry in Mexico, through the establishment of a framework for the integration of smart factories in small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) which represents almost the same percentage of GDP in both countries, 52% in the case of Mexico and 51.9% in Chile. The establishment of smart factories through the integration of innovative technologies such as AI and humanoids, collaborative robots, mobile robots using smart sensor networks and cloud computing will allow the acquisition of skills as well as their refinement and transfer to other twin factories regardless of geographical location, which will allow us to depend less on labour for merely repetitive core manufacturing activities such as those carried out during welding and assembly. Additionally, this would help redeploy staff to solve higher value-added problems and improve their conditions by upgrading new skills. In this talk we will show some examples of how AI techniques have been used by industrial robots to learn new manufacturing skills from scratch, honing their knowledge and improving through experience. We will discuss future work to enable robots to effectively acquire manipulation skills and how they can be used effectively for other robotic agents to learn through cloud computing.