A Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller is commonly used to carry out tasks like position tracking in the industrial robot manipulator controller; however, over time, the PID integral gain generates degradation within the controller, which then produces reduced stability and bandwidth. A proportional derivative (PD) controller has been proposed to deal with the increase in integral gain but is limited if gravity is not compensated for. In practice, the dynamic system non-linearities frequently are unknown or hard to obtain. Adaptive controllers are online schemes that are used to deal with systems that present non-linear and uncertainties dynamics. Adaptive controller use measured data of system trajectory in order to learn and compensate the uncertainties and external disturbances. However, these techniques can adopt more efficient learning methods in order to improve their performance. In this work, a nominal control law is used to achieve a sub-optimal performance, and a scheme based on a cascade neural network is implemented to act as a non-linear compensation whose task is to improve upon the performance of the nominal controller. The main contributions of this work are neural compensation based on a cascade neural networks and the function to update the weights of neural network used. The algorithm is implemented using radial basis function neural networks and a recompense function that leads longer traces for an identification problem. A two-degree-of-freedom robot manipulator is proposed to validate the proposed scheme and compare it with conventional PD control compensation.

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We present an automatic agave detection method for counting plants based on aerial data from a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Our objective is to autonomously count the number of agave plants in an area to aid management of the yield. An orthomosaic is obtained from agave plantations, which is then used to create a database. This database is in turn used to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The proposed method is based on computer image processing, and the CNN increases the detection performance of the approach. The main contribution of the present paper is to propose a method for agave plant detection with a high level of precision. In order to test the proposed method in a real agave plantation, we develop a UAV platform, which is equipped with several sensors to reach accurate counting. Therefore, our prototype can safely track a desired path to detect and count agave plants. For comparison purposes, we perform the same application using a simpler algorithm. The result shows that our proposed algorithm has better performance reaching an F1 score of 0.96 as opposed to 0.57 for the Haar algorithm. The obtained experimental results suggest that the proposed algorithm is robust and has considerable potential to help farmers manage agave agroecosystems.

Building inspection is a vital task because infrastructure damage puts people at risk or causes economic losses. Thanks to the technological breakthroughs in regard to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and intelligent systems, there is a real possibility to implement an inspection by means of these technologies. UAVs allow reaching difficult places and, depending on the hardware carried onboard, take data or compute algorithms to understand the environment. This paper proposes a real-time robust altitude control strategy for a quadrotor aircraft, also a convolutional neuronal network for crack recognition is developed. The main idea of this proposal is to lay the background for an autonomous system for the inspection of structures using a UAV. For the robust control, a combination of two control actions, one linear (PD) and another nonlinear (Sliding Mode) is used. The combination of these control actions allows increasing the system's performance. To verify the satisfactory performance of proposed control law, simulations and experimental results with a quadrotor, in the presence of disturbances, are presented. For crack recognition in images, several experiments were carried out validating the proposed model. For CNN training, a database of cracks was built from images taken from the Internet.