Purpose Omnidirectional mobile platforms are still plagued by the problem of heading deviation. In four-Mecanum-wheel systems, this problem arises from the phenomena of dynamic imbalance and slip of the Mecanum wheels while driving. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mechanism of omnidirectional motion using Mecanum wheels, with the aim of enhancing the heading precision. A proportional-integral-derivative

Purpose Most of the redundant dual-arm robots are singular free, dexterous and collision free compared to other robotic arms. This paper aims to analyse the workspace of redundant arms to study the manipulability. Furthermore, multi-layer perceptron (MLP) algorithm is used to determine the various joint parameters of both the upper body redundant arms. Trajectory planning of robotic arms is carried

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to achieve the optimal system design of a four-wheel mobile robot on transmission line maintenance, as the authors know transmission line mobile robot is a kind of special robot which runs on high-voltage cable to replace or assist manual power maintenance operation. In the process of live working, the manipulator, working end effector and the working environment

Purpose The following article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD and innovator regarding his pioneering efforts. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr Nabil Simaan, Professor of Mechanical

Purpose As complex analysis of contact models is required in the traditional assembly strategy, it is still a challenge for a robot to complete the multiple peg-in-hole assembly tasks autonomously. This paper aims to enable the robot to complete the assembly tasks autonomously and more efficiently, with the strategies learned by reinforcement learning (RL), a learning-accelerated deep deterministic

Purpose This paper aims to present a novel modular design framework for the haptic teleoperation of single-master/multiple-slave (SM/MS) systems with cooperating manipulators. Design/methodology/approach The user commands the remote-leader robot and the slave remote robot follows the leader in a leader–follower formation. The remote-slave is purely force-controlled. A virtual model of the remote environment

Purpose Autonomous mobile cleaning robots are widely used to clean solar panels because of their flexibility and high efficiency. However, gravity is a challenge for cleaning robots on inclined solar panels, and robots have problems such as high working power and short battery life. This paper aims to develop a following robot to improve the working time and efficiency of the cleaning robot. Desig

Purpose Walking-aid exoskeletons can assist and protect effectively the group with lower limb muscle strength decline, workers, first responders and military personnel. However, there is almost no united control strategy that can effectively assist daily walking. This paper aims to propose a hybrid oscillators’ (HOs) model to adapt to irregular gait (IG) patterns (frequent alternation between walking

Purpose This paper aims to illustrate the growing importance of agricultural robots by providing details of recent product developments and their applications. Design/methodology/approach Following a short introduction, this first discusses a range of agricultural applications of drones. It then provides details of a selection of mobile field robots and their applications. Finally, concluding comments

Purpose This paper aims to design a novel feature descriptor to improve the performance of feature matching in challenge scenes, such as low texture and wide-baseline scenes. Common descriptors are not suitable for low texture scenes and other challenging scenes mainly owing to encoding only one kind of features. The proposed feature descriptor considers multiple features and their locations, which

Purpose This paper aims to illustrate the growing importance of surgical robots by providing a short historical background and details of a selection of today’s products and their applications. Design/methodology/approach Following a short introduction, this first provides an historical perspective. It then discusses systems used in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). This is followed by examples of

Purpose This paper aims to introduce, in a tutorial form, a collection of procedures, tools and applications that can be used to explore robotics fundamentals and automatically generate kinematic and dynamic models from computer-aided design (CAD) packages, to create representations of the robot manipulator understudy so that a user can generate trajectories and to simulate and visualize the robot

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding his pioneering efforts in bringing a robotic invention to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach

Purpose This paper aims to provide details of recent advances in robotic prostheses with the emphasis on the control and sensing technologies. Design/methodology/approach Following a short introduction, this paper first discusses the main robotic prosthesis control strategies. It then provides details of recent research and developments using non-invasive and invasive brain–computer interfaces (BCIs)

Purpose This paper aims to present a new approach, called hybrid model reference adaptive controller or H-MRAC, for the hybrid controller (proportional-integral-derivative [PID + MRAC]) that will be used to control the position of a pneumatic manipulator. Design/methodology/approach It was developed a McKibben muscle using nautical mesh, latex and high-density polyethene connectors and it was constructed

Purpose This paper aims to present a novel robotic system for airport pavement inspection tasks. Design/methodology/approach The cloud-edge-terminal-based distributed architecture is designed for the proposed robotic system. Then, the following three major parts are designed and deployed, respectively: Terminal: the wheeled-robot-based data collection system. Edge: remote monitoring and data analysis

Purpose Currently, rehabilitation medical care is expensive, requires a large number of rehabilitation therapist and which can only limit in the fixed location. In addition, there is a lack of research on the structure optimization and theoretical analysis of soft actuators for hand rehabilitation. In view of the problems above, this paper aims to propose a cheap, portable, wearable soft multiple joints

Purpose Deployment of deep neural networks on embedded devices is becoming increasingly popular because it can reduce latency and energy consumption for data communication. This paper aims to give out a method for deployment the deep neural networks on a quad-rotor aircraft for further expanding its application scope. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a design scheme is proposed to implement

Purpose This study aims to propose an offline exploratory method that consists of two stages: first, the authors focus on completing the kinematics model of the system by analyzing the Jacobians in the vicinity of the starting point and deducing a virtual input to effectively navigate the system along the non-holonomic constraint. Second, the authors explore the sensorimotor space in a predetermined

Purpose This paper aims to introduce an imitation learning framework for a wheeled mobile manipulator based on dynamical movement primitives (DMPs). A novel mobile manipulator with the capability to learn from demonstration is introduced. Then, this study explains the whole process for a wheeled mobile manipulator to learn a demonstrated task and generalize to new situations. Two visual tracking controllers

Purpose This paper aims to present a new method to analyze the robot’s obstacle negotiation based on the terramechanics, where the terrain physical parameters, the sinkage and the slippage of the robot are taken into account, to enhance the robot’s trafficability. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, terramechanics is used in motion planning for all-terrain obstacle negotiation. First, wheel/track-terrain

Purpose Many work conditions require manipulators to open cabinet doors and then gain access to the desired workspace. However, after opening, the unlocked doors can easily close, interrupt a task and potentially break the operating end-effectors. This paper aims to address a manipulator's behavior planning problem for responding to a dynamic workspace released by door opening. Design/methodology/approach

Purpose Visual object tracking plays a significant role in intelligent robot systems. This study aims to focus on unlocking the tracking performance potential of the deep network and presenting a dynamic template update strategy for the Siamese trackers. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents a novel and efficient Siamese architecture for visual object tracking which introduces densely connected

Purpose Large-scale and precise three-dimensional (3D) map play an important role in autonomous driving and robot positioning. However, it is difficult to get accurate poses for mapping. On one hand, the global positioning system (GPS) data are not always reliable owing to multipath effect and poor satellite visibility in many urban environments. In another hand, the LiDAR-based odometry has accumulative

Purpose Trajectory tracking error of robotic manipulator has limited its applications in trajectory tracking control systems. This paper aims to improve the trajectory tracking accuracy of robotic manipulator, so a linear-extended-state-observer (LESO)-based prescribed performance controller is proposed. Design/methodology/approach A prescribed performance function with the convergence rate, maximum

Purpose The following paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to market while overseeing a company. This paper aims to discuss

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a follow-the-leader motion strategy for multi-section continuum robots, which aims to make the robot have the motion ability in a confined environment and avoid a collision. Design/methodology/approach First, the mechanical design of a multi-section continuum robot is introduced and the forward kinematic model is built. After that, the follow-the-leader

Purpose Visual tracking technology enables industrial robots interacting with human beings intelligently. However, due to the complexity of the tracking problem, the accuracy of visual target tracking still has great space for improvement. This paper aims to propose an accurate visual target tracking method based on standard hedging and feature fusion. Design/methodology/approach For this study, the

Purpose This paper aims to present a detailed mechanical design of a seven-degrees-of-freedom mobile parallel robot for the tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding and machining processes in fusion reactor. Detailed mechanical design of the robot is presented and both the kinematic and dynamic behaviors are studied. Design/methodology/approach First, the model of the mobile parallel robot was created in computer-aided

Purpose This aims to provide details of new sensor technologies and developments with potential applications in robotic tactile sensing and navigation. Design/methodology/approach Following a short introduction, this provides examples of tactile sensing research. This is followed by details of research into inertial sensors and other navigation techniques. Finally, brief conclusions are drawn. Findings

Purpose To the industrial application of intelligent and connected vehicles (ICVs), the robustness and accuracy of environmental perception are critical in challenging conditions. However, the accuracy of perception is closely related to the performance of sensors configured on the vehicle. To enhance sensors’ performance further to improve the accuracy of environmental perception, this paper aims

Purpose In novelty detection, the autoencoder based image reconstruction strategy is one of the mainstream solutions. The basic idea is that once the autoencoder is trained on normal data, it has a low reconstruction error on normal data. However, when faced with complex natural images, the conventional pixel-level reconstruction becomes poor and does not show the promising results. This paper aims

Purpose The rope-climbing robot that can cling to a rope for locomotion has been a popular piece of equipment for some overhead applications due to its high flexibility. In view of problems left by existing rope-climbing robots, this paper aims to propose a new-style rope-climbing robot named Finger-wheeled mechanism robot (FWMR)-II to improve their performance. Design/methodology/approach FWMR-II

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and development of a novel series-parallel robot, which aims to climb on the transmission tower. Design methodology approach This study introduces a hybrid robot, which consists of adsorption and two 3-degree of freedom (DOF) translation parallel legs connected by a body linkage. The DOF of the legs ensures that the robot can move on the climbing

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a tetrahedral mobile robot with only revolute joints (TMRR). By using rotation actuators, the mechanism of the robot gains favorable working space and eliminates the engineering difficulties caused by the multilevel extension compared with liner actuators. Furthermore, the rolling locomotion is improved to reduce displacement error based on dynamics

Purpose To reduce the effect of parameter uncertainties and input saturation on path tracking control for autonomous combine harvester, a path tracking controller is proposed, which integrates an adaptive neural network estimator and a saturation-aided system. Design/methodology/approach First, to analyze and compensate the influence of external factors, the vehicle model is established combining a

Purpose This papers aims to provide a fixed cutter axis control (F-CAC) industrial robot (IR) milling for NURBS surfaces with large fluctuation, which can avoid over-cut and interference during IR milling in contrast to variable cutter axis control (V-CAC) IR milling. Design/methodology/approach After the design of a target surface, the IR reciprocating milling trajectory can be obtained using NURBS

Purpose The inspection of flexible risers is a critical activity to ensure continuous productivity and safety in oil and gas production. The purpose of this paper is to present the design and development of a novel automatic underwater tool for riser inspection that fits the most commonly used riser diameters and significantly improves inspection quality and reduces its operating costs. Design/methodology/approach

Purpose With the improvement of modern aircraft requirements for safety, long life and economy, higher quality aircraft assembly is needed. However, due to the manufacturing and assembly errors of the posture adjustment mechanism (PAM) used in the digital assembly of aircraft large component (ALC), the posture alignment accuracy of ALC is difficult to be guaranteed, and the posture adjustment stress

Purpose This paper aims to propose a measurement principle and a calibration method of measurement system integrated with serial robot and 3D camera to identify its parameters conveniently and achieve high measurement accuracy. Design/methodology/approach A stiffness and kinematic measurement principle of the integrated system is proposed, which considers the influence of robot weight and load weight

Purpose This paper aims to develope a novel fractional hybrid impedance control (FHIC) approach for high-sensitive contact stress force tracking control of the series elastic muscle-tendon actuator (SEM-TA) in uncertain environments. Design/methodology/approach In three different cases, the fractional parameters of the FHIC were optimized with the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Its adaptability

Purpose The authors want to design an adaptive grasping control strategy without setting the expected contact force in advance to maintain grasping stable, so that the proposed control system can deal with unknown object grasping manipulation tasks. Design/methodology/approach The adaptive grasping control strategy is proposed based on bang-bang-like control principle and slippage detection module

Purpose A novel proportional integral derivative-extended state disturbance observer-based control (PID-ESDOBC) algorithm is proposed to solve the nonlinear hydrodynamics, parameters perturbation and external disturbance in yaw control of remote operated vehicles (ROVs). The effectiveness of PID-ESDOBC is verified through the experiments and the results indicate that the proposed method can effectively

Purpose With the increasing demand for surveillance and smart transportation, drone technology has become the center of attraction for robotics researchers. This study aims to introduce a new path planning approach to drone navigation based on topology in an uncertain environment. The main objective of this study is to use the Ricci flow evolution equation of metric and curvature tensor over angular

Purpose This paper aims to propose a novel method based on a gesture primitives analysis of human daily grasping tasks for designing dexterous hands with various grasping and in-hand manipulation abilities, which simplifies the complex and redundant humanoid five-finger hand system. Design/methodology/approach First, the authors developed the fingers and the joint configuration with a series of gesture

Purpose This study aims to propose an improved linear quadratic regulator (LQR) based on the adjusting weight coefficient, which is used to improve the performance of the vehicle direct yaw moment control (DYC) system. Design/methodology/approach After analyzing the responses of the side-slip angle and the yaw rate of the vehicle when driving under different road adhesion coefficients, the genetic

Purpose This paper aims to review the shape sensing techniques using large area flexible electronics (LAFE). Shape perception of humanoid robots using tactile data is mainly focused. Design/methodology/approach Research papers on different shape sensing methodologies of objects with large area, published in the past 15 years, are reviewed with emphasis on contact-based shape sensors. Fiber optics based

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the method for grasping a defined set of objects in an unstructured environment. To this end, the authors propose the method of integrating convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection and the category-free grasping method. The considered scenario is related to mobile manipulating platforms that move freely between workstations

Purpose This paper aims to provide details of recently developed firefighting robots and their applications. Design/methodology/approach Following a short introduction, this paper, firstly, gives details of a selection of recently launched terrestrial firefighting robots. It then discusses the role of drones and describes some recent developments and applications. Finally, conclusions are drawn. Findings

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the preload range of tendon-driven manipulator and the relationship between preload and damping. The flexible joint manipulator (FJM) with joint flexibility is safer than traditional rigid manipulators. A FJM having an elastic tendon is called an elastic tendon-driven manipulator (ETDM) and has the advantages of being driven by a cable and having a more

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding his pioneering efforts in the industrial robot industry and the commercialization and challenges of bringing robotic inventions

Purpose The mass electronics sector is one of the most critical sources of waste, in terms of volume and content with dangerous effects on the environment. The purpose of this study is to provide an automated and accurate dismantling system that can improve the outcome of recycling. Design/methodology/approach Following a short introduction, the paper details the implementation layout and highlights

Purpose Continuum manipulators are often used in complex and narrow space in recent years because of their flexibility and safety. Vision is considered to be one of the most direct methods to obtain its spatial shape. However, with the improvement of the cooperation requirements of multiple continuum manipulators and the increase of space limitation, it is impossible to obtain the complete spatial

Purpose This study aims to realize the constant force grinding of automobile wheel hub. Design/methodology/approach A force control strategy of backstepping + proportion integration differentiation (PID) is proposed. The grinding end effector is installed on the flange of the robot. The robot controls the position and posture of the grinding end actuator and the grinding end actuator controls the grinding

Purpose The purpose of this study is to design, program and implement an intelligent robot for shelf-reading. an essential task in library maintenance is shelf-reading, which refers to the process of checking the disciplines of books based on their call numbers to ensure that they are correctly shelved. Shelf-reading is a routine yet challenging task for librarians, as it involves controlling call

Purpose This paper aims to propose a diverless weld bead maintenance welding technology to prevent the leakage of subsea oil and gas pipeline and solve the key problems in the maintenance of subsea pipeline. Design/methodology/approach Based on the analysis of the cross-section of the fillet weld, the multi-layer and multi-pass welding path planning of the submarine pipeline sleeve fillet weld is studied

Purpose This paper aims to propose a bilateral robotic system for lower extremity hemiparesis rehabilitation. The hemiplegic patients can complete rehabilitation exercise voluntarily with the assistance of the robot. The reinforcement learning is included in the robot control system, enhancing the muscle activation of the impaired limbs (ILs) efficiently with ensuring the patients’ safety. Design/

Purpose This paper aims to enable the unmanned aerial vehicles to inspect the surface condition of wind turbine in close range when the global positioning system signal is not reliable, and further improve its intelligence. So a visual-inertial odometry with point and line features is developed. Design/methodology/approach Visual front-end combining point and line features, as well as its purification

Purpose This paper aims to use the Monodepth method to improve the prediction speed of identifying the obstacles and proposes a Probability Dueling DQN algorithm to optimize the path of the agent, which can reach the destination more quickly than the Dueling DQN algorithm. Then the path planning algorithm based on Probability Dueling DQN is combined with FastSLAM to accomplish the autonomous navigation

Purpose Laser-based measurement techniques offer various advantages over conventional measurement techniques, such as no-destructive, no-contact, fast and long measuring distance. In cooperative laser ranging systems, it’s crucial to extract center coordinates of retroreflectors to accomplish automatic measurement. To solve this problem, this paper aims to propose a novel method. Design/methodology/approach