This paper investigates the problem of the variable stiffness for a class of multisegment continuum manipulators. A simple design that mainly consists of two types of pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs) is introduced to deal with the problem. To provide a detailed analysis, this characteristic of the variable stiffness is coupled with a mathematical analysis that is built upon the geometric mechanics

The quality requirements in clothing manufacturing have been increasing and consumer pressure on prices has also grown steadily. In fact, the textile industry is continuously seeking for countries practicing low salaries, because this kind of industry is usually based on labour-intensive tasks, to the detriment of task automation. Thus, clothing manufacturers need to be creative in order to improve

Hand layup is a commonly used process for making composite structures from several plies of carbon-fiber prepreg. The process involves multiple human operators manipulating and conforming layers of prepreg to a mold. The manual layup process is ergonomically challenging, tedious, and limits throughput. Moreover, different operators may perform the process differently, and hence introduce inconsistency

This paper presents an effective semi-analytical approach for predicting lower-order dynamics of a five degrees-of-freedom (DOF) hybrid robot named TriMule, which is composed of a 3-DOF parallel mechanism plus a 2-DOF A/C wrist. In this method, the governing equations of motion of limbs within the parallel mechanism are first formulated by finite element analysis (FEA) and then reduced to super-element

Extrusion-Based Additive Manufacturing is one of the most commonly used Additive Manufacturing techniques. However, the technique requires that the overhang features in a model should be provided with supports from below. The added supports contribute to a major source of material waste during the manufacturing process. In order to save support materials, considering 3D printing directions as a constraint

Collaborative robots (cobots) are robots that are designed to collaborate with humans in an open workspace. In contrast to industrial robots in an enclosed environment, cobots need additional mechanisms to assure humans’ safety in collaborations. It is especially true when a cobot is used in manufacturing environment; since the workload or moving mass is usually large enough to hurt human when a contact

Kinematics of flexible backbone continuum robots is highly non linear and its complexity quickly escalates with the number of sections of the robot, which is usually more than three. This paper introduces a kinematic modelling of actuation and configuration spaces that greatly simplifies the computational requirements compared to the commonly used Piecewise Constant Curvature Kinematics which results

An assembly interface of a large-scale aircraft component is a joint surface to connect adjacent large components. To guarantee the final assembly accuracy of the large components, the assembly interface is finish machined on site before the final assembly to cut the observed machining allowance. Thus, aiming at realizing the high efficiency and high quality in the finish machining operation, in this

A prototype of a rigid-flexible-soft hybrid finger mechanism with a standard force sensor is developed, and its kinematics and statics are studied systematically. First, its structure performances are analyzed, its equivalent mechanism is constructed and the degree of freedoms of the equivalent mechanism with constant or variable length of the flexible rod are analyzed. Second, the kinematics formulas

Using robots to assemble parts has always been a research hotspot, but the traditional analysis model of assembly mainly focuses on establishing the linear equation between the feedback force and the relative position of the peg and hole, which leads to high requirements for the material properties and geometric parameters of the assembly parts. In this paper, a new assembly strategy is proposed that

Human–robot collaboration is a main technology of Industry 4.0 and is currently changing the shop floor of manufacturing companies. Collaborative robots are innovative industrial technologies introduced to help operators to perform manual activities in so called cyber-physical production systems and combine human inimitable abilities with smart machines strengths. Occupational health and safety criteria

This article addresses a method for placement determination of robotic drilling system on two-dimensional manifold in robot joint space. It has been proved that the feasibility of positioning error compensation on two-dimensional manifold, and that the continuity of the robot parameters in the two-dimensional space is the prerequisite to perform the compensation in previous study. It appears that there

Recent advancements in human-robot collaboration have enabled human operators and robots to work together in a shared manufacturing environment. However, current distance-based collision-free human-robot collaboration system can only ensure human safety but not assembly efficiency. In this paper, the authors present a context awareness-based collision-free human-robot collaboration system that can

Toolpath smoothing is an important approach to improve robots’ operational stability and machining quality. Nowadays, the corner rounding smoothing and curve fitting smoothing algorithms are usually adopted to process the linear toolpath segments to improve its continuity. But the high order continuity between the fitted curve and its adjacent curves is difficult to be guaranteed. For parallel machining

Building time is an important issue in material extrusion-based additive manufacturing because in such a process head repositioning is always required between deposition segments (contours and rasters). The length of head repositioning, usually referred to as tool-path airtime or non-productive time, can be minimized by applying optimization algorithms. A particular issue in this area is the size of

Cloud manufacturing is a new manufacturing model that aims to provide on-demand manufacturing services to consumers over the Internet. Service composition is an essential issue as well as an important technique in cloud manufacturing (CMfg) that supports construction of larger-granularity, value-added services by combining a number of smaller-granularity services to satisfy consumers’ complex requirements

Large-scale components with complex curved surfaces are the foundation of aerospace, energy, and transportation fields, while full-field 3D measurements along with accuracy analyses are critical to control manufacturing quality. Most of the existing measurement methodologies rely on manual inspection, and the accuracy and efficiency are unsatisfactory. This paper introduces an integrated mobile robotic

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm aimed at connecting everyday objects to the internet. IoT applications include smart cities, healthcare, agriculture, as well as the industry and manufacturing. The ability to monitor and control the physical world using information technology creates many opportunities. However, it also comes with some costs. The exponential growth of connected devices, the

Robotic belt grinding of the leading and trailing edges of complex blades is considered to be a challenging task, since the microscopic material removal mechanism is complicated due to the flexible contact state accompanied with greatly varying curvature that finally affects the machined profile accuracy. The resulting poor accuracy of blade edges, to a great extent, is attributed to the trajectory

The manufacturing industry is seeing an increase in demand for more custom-made, low-volume production. This type of production is rarely automated and is to a large extent still performed manually. To keep up with the competition and market demands, manufacturers will have to undertake the effort to automate such manufacturing processes. However, automating low-volume production is no small feat as

Humans are favoured to conventional robotics for some tasks in industry due to their increased dexterity and fine motor skills, however, performance of these tasks can result in injury to the user at a cost to both the user and the employer. In this paper we describe a lightweight, upper-limb exosuit intended to assist the user during lifting tasks (up to 10kg) and while operating power tools, which

To guarantee the docking accuracy of large-scale components, their assembly interfaces usually need to be finished before the final assembly. However, there are some crucial problems affecting finishing efficiency and quality, e.g. use of hard-to-machine material at the assembly interface, manual interventions and process diversity in finish machining, difficulties in the alignment of the large component

Cloud manufacturing has been acknowledged as a transformative manufacturing paradigm aiming towards producing highly customized products via sharing distributed manufacturing resources and capabilities. One of the pivotal challenges regarding the practical realization of this idea is the process of matching manufacturing resources with personalized service demands. This problem contains two main steps:

Robots have become indispensable parts for the industrial automated workshop. The distance calculation between the industrial robot and obstacles is a fundamental problem for the robotic collision-free motion control. But existing methods for this problem have the disadvantage that the accuracy and execution efficiency cannot be guaranteed at the same time. In this paper, a pseudo-distance algorithm

Traditional robot teaching methods are cumbersome, tedious and difficult to scale for high-mix low-volume applications. The tape masking, a common process for surface protection before plasma spraying, spray painting and shot peening, is one of those domains where robotic automation lacks flexibility and reliability due to the complexity in task. Fortunately, it is still within the grasps of human-robot

Industrial robots are typically not used for milling of hard materials due to their low stiffness compared to traditional machine tools. Due to milling being a five degree of freedom (dof) operation, a typical six dof serial manipulator introduces a redundant degree of freedom in the robot pose. This redundancy can be exploited to optimize the pose of the robot during milling to minimize force-induced

Positioning and vibration isolation are two important steps for sensitive payloads to realize precision observation in space environment. However, current base stages applied to sensitive payloads often focus on one function, thus limiting their engineering applications. This paper presents a novel parallel micro-nano positioning-vibration isolation stage (PVI stage), which could realize the two functions

Due to the rapid development of social economy and diverse market demands, higher requirements are put forward for the existing manufacturing environment, such as the self-organizing aggregation of manufacturing resources, the business collaboration among enterprises, the process control of all stages in the product lifecycle, and the servitization of manufacturing resources. Despite the current research

Cloud manufacturing is an emerging manufacturing paradigm, with the issue of service composition being one of its most significant challenges. The current researches take the view that all manufacturing services are of equal importance. However, in fact, manufacturing services that owns scarce resources are more important than ordinary one, especially in the production of complex products. Hence, it

This paper reports about the virtual and physical prototyping of an antagonistic Variable Stiffness Actuator (VSA) to be used on robotic arms specifically realized for physical human-robot interaction. Such antagonistic actuation system, which comprises purposely conceived Compliant Transmission Elements (CTEs) characterized by a nonlinear relation between the deflection and the applied torque, allows

Robotic gas tungsten arc (GTA)-based additive manufacturing (AM) is a promising technique to produce high-quality and large-scale metal parts with low cost. Despite this fact, the key issue of ensuring deposition height stability has not been fully solved. In this study, an arc voltage sensing and control approach with little delay is proposed to increase the forming height stability in GTA-based AM

One of the major areas of interest for deployment of blockchains is in the supply chain sector where decentralisation combined with immutability is expected to enhance the transparency and robustness of transaction processing drastically. In this work we contribute to a feasibility study for permissioned blockchains in the context of a major international retail company. First, we characterise the

The knowledge base is an essential part of the fault diagnosis system, which is crucial to the performance of fault recognition. As the intelligence of the fault diagnosis system has made persistent advance, the increasing demands for diversity and dynamic update have posed challenges to the knowledge base. In this paper, a framework for the fault diagnosis knowledge base is proposed to address the

As a typical manufacturing equipment, CNC machine tool (CNCMT) is the mother machine of industry. Fault of CNCMT might cause the loss of precision and affect the production if troubleshooting is not timely. Therefore, the reliability of CNCMT has a big significance. Predictive maintenance is an effective method to avoid faults and casualties. Due to less consideration of the status variety and consistency

As one of the most prevailing retail channels, E-commerce has nowadays facilitated retailers to sell goods to customers worldwide and tremendously increased the supply chain efficiency by removing most intermediate links. The broaden business scope and accelerated goods circulation, nevertheless, have generally led to capital shortages for retailers, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is a state-of-the-art manufacturing paradigm implementing the concept of service-oriented manufacturing. Machine tools are one kind of the critical manufacturing resources in Cloud Manufacturing, however machine tool matching is still immature owning to customization manufacturing service demands from users and various disturbing factors in production. This paper proposes

Grippers are widely used in Industrial Internet for facilitating various operations such as logistics, materials handling, assembly, etc. Current grippers are specifically designed for a specific application so that it is difficult to adapt to a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Soft grippers have been developed to grasp objects with high surface complexity in Industrial Internet. Some challenges such

Grasp detection based on deep learning is an important method for robots to accurately perceive unstructured environments. However, the deep learning method widely used in general object detection is not suitable for robotic grasp detection. Multi-stage network is often designed to meet the requirements of grasp posture, but they increase computation complexity. This paper proposes a single-stage robotic

Industrial robots are traditionally used at machining cells for machine feeding and workpiece handling. A reassignment of tasks to improve the productivity requires a modelling of the robot behaviour from the point of view of its position precision. This paper characterizes and predicts the precision achievable when drilling with an industrial robot in order to use it in machining operations. Robot

A time-optimal motion planning method for robotic machining of sculptured surfaces is reported in this paper. Compared with the general time-optimal robot motion planning, a surface machining process provides extra constraints such as tool-tip kinematic limits and complexity of the curved tool path that also need to be taken into account. In the proposed method, joint space and tool-tip kinematic constraints

In a cloud manufacturing system, manufacturing services form the service network and collaboration network. The performance of the networks can affect the cloud manufacturing system. Researchers can study the behavior of enterprises, service, resource and elements in cloud manufacturing through the simulation platform. In this paper, the service agent in the simulation platform can drive the manufacturing

Industry 4.0 describes a smart job shop as follows: it can meet individual customer requirements even if the requirements are changed at the last minute; its production control system (PCS) can rapidly respond to unexpected disruptions in production, and smart workpieces in the smart job shop can communicate with workstations to tell them what to do next. Present PCSs issue production instruction (PI)

Hybrid robots consist of both serial and parallel mechanisms, which have advantages in stiffness and workspace compared with serial/parallel robots when machining composite material. However, the forward and inverse kinematics of hybrid robots generally do not have analytic solutions. This paper deals with the analytic forward and inverse kinematics solutions of a 5-degree-of-freedom (DOF) hybrid robot

This paper proposes a 6R robot closed-loop kinematic calibration method to improve absolute position accuracy with point and distance constraints though machine vision. In the calibration process, a camera attached to the mounting plate of the robot is used to capture a fixed reference sphere as a point constraint and to record robot joint angles and gauge block lengths that are used as a distance

Robotic curved layer additive manufacturing (a.k.a. multi-axis 3D printing) has been gaining attention recently owing to its simplicity and unique ability of printing complex shapes without using a support structure. However, as the printing path now is no long planar and the nozzle orientation is no longer fixed but changes continuously during printing, even though it could be smooth when defined

In service-oriented manufacturing models, manufacturing resources in different enterprises are integrated and shared through network, cloud platforms, and logistics. On cloud manufacturing platforms, service providers offer on-demand manufacturing services to service demanders according to supply-demand matching results. As a special type of manufacturing services, logistics services provide transportation

This work focuses on additive manufacturing by Directed Energy Deposition (DED) using a 6-axis robot. The objective is to generate an optimized trajectory in the joint space, taking into account axis redundancy for parts of revolution produced with a coaxial deposition system. To achieve this goal, a new layer-by-layer method coupled with a trajectory constrained optimization is presented. The optimization

This paper presents a unified framework for computing a B-spline curve to approximate the micro-line toolpath within the desired fitting accuracy. First, a bi-chord error test extended from our previous work is proposed to select the dominant points that govern the overall shape of the micro-line toolpath. It fully considers the geometric characteristics of the micro-line toolpath, i.e., the curvature

Due to ever increasing precision and automation demands in robotic welding, the automatic and robust 3D seam extraction has become a research hot-spot of the welding robots. At present, most of the research work about seam extraction is aimed at butt joints. Nevertheless,too little work has been devoted to fillet joints and lap joints. Consequently,to achieve robust 3D seam extraction of different

During the robotic milling process, vibration is one of the main factors that affect the machining accuracy and surface quality due to the low stiffness of the robot structure. The robotic milling stability is a function of the frequency response function (FRF) at the tool tip, which is posture-dependent within the workspace. This paper introduces an approach for rapidly predicting the tool tip FRF

The increased complexity of modern production systems requires sophisticated system control approaches to maintain high levels of flexibility. Furthermore, the request for customized production with the introduction of heterogeneous production resources, increases the diversity of manufacturing systems making their reconfiguration complex and time consuming. In this paper, an end-to-end approach for

Over the past half-century, manufacturers have strived to achieve “Zero Inventory (ZI)” manufacturing, which puts the burden on suppliers to build their warehouses nearby production lines to meet the strict time delivery requirements of ZI production. Considerable improvements in manufacturing processes have been made. However, this practice in the meanwhile brings excessive warehousing operations

Cloud Manufacturing is a paradigm of intelligent manufacturing system with information opening, resource sharing, and diversified services. In order to research the issues in cloud manufacturing, such as behaviors of a service provider and service consumer, matching of service, dynamic change of resource, verification of business model, scheduling of service and evolution of service network, cloud

Nowadays, as an efficient and automatic welding machine that accepts and executes human instructions, welding robots are widely used in industry. However, the lack of intelligence in process planning makes welding preparation complex and time-consuming. In order to realize intelligent process planning of robotic welding, one of the key factors is designing a welding task data model that can support

Shared Manufacturing (SharedMfg), a Peer-to-Peer (P2P)-based resource sharing paradigm boosted by the wide-spread of sharing economy, servitization and Internet of things, tends to massively extend the scope of resource sharing in both vertical and horizontal directions, and as a consequence, it amplifies a credibility gap in the manufacturing area. To respond to this problem, and meanwhile, promoting

Selecting an appropriate additive manufacturing (AM) process or machine to fabricate an end-use product is an important issue in design for AM. One of many types of approaches for AM process selection is based on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). Most of the MCDM based approaches have an advantage in taking into account the relative importance of performance parameter types and a few of them also

At present, online lead-through and offline programming methods are widely used in programming of industrial robots. However, both methods have some drawbacks for unskilled shopworkers. This paper presents an Augmented Reality (AR)-based interactive robot teaching programming system, which virtually projected the robot onto the physical industrial environment. The unskilled shopworkers can use Handheld

In this study, an intelligent robotic precise assembly system for rapid teaching and admittance control was developed. The system comprised three parts, namely the teaching, trajectory learning, and controlling systems. The teaching system controlled the robotic arm through a haptic device and generated tactile feedback for the operator. The trajectory learning system optimized the reference trajectory

Hybrid serial-parallel kinematic machine tool (HSPKMT) has been regarded as a promising solution for 5-axis machining in many industrial fields. A typical HSPKMT can be constructed by integrating a parallel functional module with a serial functional module. Following this way, the authors construct a novel 5-axis HSPKMT through the integration of an over constrained redundantly actuated parallel module