Abstract
In modern industrial environments, ensuring the quality of manufactured components is critical, particularly when dealing with reflective surfaces that hinder conventional inspection techniques. Although deep learning-based methods offer robust solutions for visual defect detection, their performance often hinges on the availability of substantial annotated datasets. In industrial scenarios, labeling such datasets is costly and time-consuming. This study investigates applying sample selection techniques to reduce annotation efforts for porosity detection on machined aluminium parts. Several selection strategies were evaluated using a real-world dataset composed of high-resolution images, including uncertainty, diversity, random-based criteria, and hybrid combinations. The best-performing strategy, which combined entropy-based uncertainty, spatial diversity, and random-based, achieved an F1-score of 86.70% and a recall of 82.99% after ten iterations using only 2,400 annotated images, corresponding to 66.67% of the active learning pool. Although the fully supervised model achieved an F1-score of 88.84% and a recall of 86.30%, the proposed approach proved a competitive alternative. These results demonstrate that selective data annotation can significantly reduce labeling effort while maintaining reliable performance in defect detection, even under the challenging conditions posed by reflective industrial parts.

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Abstract

Abstract
The European Project Semester (EPS), offered by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), is a capstone programme designed for undergraduate students in engineering, product design, and business. EPS@ISEP fosters project-based learning, promotes multicultural and interdisciplinary teamwork, and ethics- and sustainability-driven design. This study applies Natural Language Processing techniques, specifically text mining, to analyse project papers produced by EPS@ISEP teams. The proposed method aims to identify evidence of ethical concerns within EPS@ISEP projects. An innovative keyword mapping approach is introduced that first defines and refines a list of ethics-related keywords through prompt engineering. This enriched list of keywords is then used to systematically map the content of project papers. The findings indicate that the EPS@ISEP robotics project papers analysed demonstrate awareness of ethical considerations and actively incorporate them into design processes. The method presented is adaptable to various application areas, such as monitoring compliance with responsible innovation or sustainability policies. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Abstract
Hexapod robots, with their six-legged design, excel in stability and adaptability on challenging terrain but pose significant control challenges due to their high degrees of freedom. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored for robot navigation, few studies have systematically compared on-policy and off-policy methods for multi-legged locomotion. This work presents a comparative study of SARSA and Q-Learning for trajectory control of a simulated hexapod robot, focusing on the influence of learning rate (alpha), discount factor (gamma), and eligibility trace (lambda). The evaluation spans eight initial poses, with performance measured through lateral deviation (Ey), orientation error (E theta), and iteration count. Results show that Q-Learning generally achieves faster convergence and greater stability, particularly with higher gamma and lambda values, while SARSA can achieve competitive accuracy with careful parameter tuning. The findings demonstrate that eligibility traces substantially improve learning precision and provide practical guidelines for robust RL-based control in multi-legged robotic systems.