Deep in situ microscopy for real-time analysis of mammalian cell populations in bioreactors.

An in situ microscope based on pulsed transmitted light illumination via optical fiber was combined to artificial-intelligence to enable for the first time an online cell classification according to well-known cellular morphological features. A 848 192-image database generated during a lab-scale production process of antibodies was processed using a convolutional neural network approach chosen for its accurate real-time object detection capabilities. In order to induce different cell death routes, hybridomas were grown in normal or suboptimal conditions in a stirred tank reactor, in the presence of substrate limitation, medium addition, pH regulation problem or oxygen depletion. Using such an optical system made it possible to monitor real-time the evolution of different classes of animal cells, among which viable, necrotic and apoptotic cells. A class of viable cells displaying bulges in feast or famine conditions was also revealed. Considered as a breakthrough in the catalogue of process analytical tools, in situ microscopy powered by artificial-intelligence is also of great interest for research.

Automatic Detection and Modeling of Underground Pipes Using a Portable 3D LiDAR System.

Automatic and accurate mapping and modeling of underground infrastructure has become indispensable for several important tasks ranging from urban planning and construction to safety and hazard mitigation. However, this offers several technical and operational challenges. The aim of this work is to develop a portable automated mapping solution for the 3D mapping and modeling of underground pipe networks during renovation and installation work when the infrastructure is being laid down in open trenches. The system is used to scan the trench and then the 3D scans obtained from the system are registered together to form a 3D point cloud of the trench containing the pipe network using a modified global ICP (iterative closest point) method. In the 3D point cloud, pipe-like structures are segmented using fuzzy C-means clustering and then modeled using a nested MSAC (M-estimator SAmpling Consensus) algorithm. The proposed method is evaluated on real data pertaining to three different sites, containing several different types of pipes. We report an overall registration error of less than 7 % , an overall segmentation accuracy of 85 % and an overall modeling error of less than 5 % . The evaluated results not only demonstrate the efficacy but also the suitability of the proposed solution.

Stage-Wise Learning of Reaching Using Little Prior Knowledge.

In some manipulation robotics environments, because of the difficulty of precisely modeling dynamics and computing features which describe well the variety of scene appearances, hand-programming a robot behavior is often intractable. Deep reinforcement learning methods partially alleviate this problem in that they can dispense with hand-crafted features for the state representation and do not need pre-computed dynamics. However, they often use prior information in the task definition in the form of shaping rewards which guide the robot toward goal state areas but require engineering or human supervision and can lead to sub-optimal behavior. In this work we consider a complex robot reaching task with a large range of initial object positions and initial arm positions and propose a new learning approach with minimal supervision. Inspired by developmental robotics, our method consists of a weakly-supervised stage-wise procedure of three tasks. First, the robot learns to fixate the object with a 2-camera system. Second, it learns hand-eye coordination by learning to fixate its end-effector. Third, using the knowledge acquired in the previous steps, it learns to reach the object at different positions and from a large set of initial robot joint angles. Experiments in a simulated environment show that our stage-wise framework yields similar reaching performances, compared with a supervised setting without using kinematic models, hand-crafted features, calibration parameters or supervised visual modules.