Hexapod robots are widely used for resource exploration, post-disaster rescue, and military equipment. They typically travel on rugged and complex roads. The robot itself has a high probability of ...

This research proposes a multifaceted approach of three-dimensional trajectory planning based on the combination of Rapidly-exploring Random Tree–Connect algorithm and artificial potential field me...

The control based on dynamic model could improve the dynamic performance of manipulators and obtain better control effects than the control based on kinematic model. As manipulators are complex onl...

For patients with upper limb dysfunction after stroke, robot-assisted rehabilitation training plays an important role in functional recovery. The existing upper limb rehabilitation robots have some...

This article proposes an Intelligent Carom Billiards Assistive System for a novice at Carom Billiards. Since a novice player is very difficult to find the solution paths of the cue ball, the ICBAS ...

In recent years, surface electromyogram signals have been increasingly used to operate wearable devices. These devices can aid to help workers or soldiers to lower the load in the task to boost eff...

This article presents the design, functional simulation, and prototype of an innovative adaptive jaw gripper. First, based on the comparative analysis of several types of anthropomorphic finger gri...

Aiming at the local minimum point problem in an artificial potential field based on a safe distance model, this article proposes an algorithm for active obstacle avoidance path planning and trackin...

In nuclear and radiation-related industries, it is crucial to ensure that the radiation dose exposure to the radiation worker is maintained below the permissible dose limit. A radiation map is a us...

This article mainly studies the trajectory tracking control for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle with unknown time-varying disturbances including parametric uncertainties, model errors, and extern...

Radar absorbing structures are manufactured for stealth missions and total quality inspection applies to evaluate their performances before assembly to stealth weapon systems. This study adopted a ...

To improve the human–computer interaction ability and environmental adaptability of the quadruped robot, especially the ability of the quadruped robot to follow people and avoid obstacles. In this article, the fusion of ultra-wideband positioning technology and three-dimensional laser radar is applied to a quadruped robot. The core is to scan the surrounding obstacle information through three-dimensional

Inertial measurement unit or other navigation devices are used to obtain the posture information of most mobile robots based on ultrawide band. However, problems, such as zero drift, temperature drift, and error increasing with time, exist in inertial measurement unit and other navigation devices. To overcome these problems, a posture algorithm for mobile robot based on ultrawide band is proposed in

Cloth manipulation remains a challenging problem for the robotic community. Recently, there has been an increased interest in applying deep learning techniques to problems in the fashion industry. As a result, large annotated data sets for cloth category classification and landmark detection were created. In this work, we leverage these advances in deep learning to perform cloth manipulation. We propose

Autonomous exploration is grounded on target decision and trajectory planning, which is widely deployed on unmanned aerial vehicles. However, existing methods generally only focus on the exploration effect of target decision but neglect the environment information gained with trajectory planning during flight, resulting in redundant exploration trajectories and low exploration efficiency. This article

Redundant manipulators are flexible enough to adapt to complex environments, but their controller is also required to be specific for their extra degrees of freedom. Inspired by the morphology of snakes, we propose a path planning algorithm named Swinging Search and Crawling Control, which allows the snake-like redundant manipulators to explore in complex pipeline environments without collision. The

This article is dedicated to solving the problem of predefined-time cooperative control for autonomous surface vessels encountering model uncertainties and external perturbations. By virtue of the prescribed-time stable theory, a robust formation controller is constructed, with which the settling time of the cooperative system can be prescribed in advance. The controller is developed under the backstepping

With the introduction of the laterally bounded forces, the tilt-rotor gains more flexibility in the controller design. Typical feedback linearization methods utilize all the inputs in controlling this vehicle; the magnitudes as well as the directions of the thrusts are maneuvered simultaneously based on a unified control rule. Although several promising results indicate that these controllers may track

In existing rehabilitation training, research on the accuracy of recognizing completed actions has achieved good results; however, the reduction in the misjudgment rate in the action conversion process needs further research. This article proposes a multichannel information fusion method for the movement conversion process of squat/sit-to-stand, which can help online movement conversion classification

A new kind of 18 degrees of freedom gantry robot with multiple manipulators could be used to complete the double-sided laser beam welding of stringer–skin T-shape structure for aircraft skin. The coordination control combined with error allocation model analysis is proposed to improve the stability and accuracy of the robot in this article. Firstly, the error model of the stringer–skin T-shape structure

The use of mobile robots for assisting astronauts in extravehicular activities could be an effective option for improving mission productivity and crew safety. It is thus critical that these robots follow the astronaut and maintain a stable distance to provide personalized and timely assistance. However, most extraterrestrial bodies exhibit rugged terrain that can impede a robot’s movements. As such

To solve the problems of slow convergence speed, poor robustness, and complex calculation of image Jacobian matrix in image-based visual servo system, a hybrid regression model based on multiple adaptive regression spline and online sequential extreme learning machine is proposed to predict the product of pseudo inverse of image Jacobian matrix and image feature error and online sequential extreme

The inverse kinematics problem involves the study that the inverse kinematics solver needs to calculate the values of the joint variables given the desired pose of the end-effector of a robot. However, to apply to seven-degree-of-freedom robots with arbitrary configuration, analytical methods need to fix one joint and set an increment when the current value fails to solve the inverse kinematics problem

The excellent performance of fruit and vegetable picking robots is usually contributed by the reasonable structure of end-effector and recognition–localization methods with high accuracy. As a result, efforts are focused on two aspects, and diverse structures of end-effector, target recognition methods as well as their combinations are yielded continuously. A good understanding for the working principle

To enhance the path following ability for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles, and solve the stability and high-accuracy tracking problems due to inappropriate route switchover time during intense maneuvers, an improved nonlinear path following method with on-line transition trajectory generation was proposed in the article. Firstly, the influence of the guidance distance to the nonlinear path following

Recently, the increasing interest in underwater exploration motivates the development of aquatic unmanned vehicles. To execute hazardous tasks in an unknown or even hostile environment, researchers have directed on developing biomimetic robots inspired by the extraordinary maneuverability, cruising speed, and propulsion efficiency of fish. Nevertheless, the performance of current prototypes still has

The design of underwater unmanned vehicles is an interdisciplinary study that includes several fields, such as computational fluid dynamics, modeling and control of systems, robotics, image processing, and electronic card design. The operational cost of such vehicles is high because it is dependent on variable fluid properties like salinity and high pressure while its’ mobility must be resistant to

Image moments are global descriptors of an image and can be used to achieve control-decoupling properties in visual servoing. However, only a few methods completely decouple the control. This study introduces a novel camera pose estimation method, which is a closed-form solution, based on the image moments of planar objects. Traditional position-based visual servoing estimates the pose of a camera

Point cloud semantic segmentation based on deep learning methods is still a challenge due to the irregularity of structures and uncertainty of sampling. Color information often contains a lot of prior information, whereas the existing methods do not attach more importance to it. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel hard attention mechanism, named color-guided convolution. This convolution

The present study envisages the development of an improved line features method to accurately estimate the attitude of the airdrop cargo platform during airdrop landing. Therefore, this article uses the geometric characteristics of the line features to improve the traditional line features extraction and removes the locally dense line features in the image, which greatly reduces the number of line

The accuracy of agricultural unmanned ground vehicles’ localization directly affects the accuracy of their navigation. However, due to the changeable environment and fewer features in the agricultural scene, it is challenging for these unmanned ground vehicles to localize precisely in global positioning system-denied areas with a single sensor. In this article, we present an efficient and adaptive

Sensory perception for dexterous robotic hands is an active research area and recent progress in robotics. Effective dexterous manipulation requires robotic hands to accurately feedback their state or perceive the surrounding environment. This article reviews the state-of-the-art of sensory perception for dexterous robotic manipulation. Two types of sensors, such as intrinsic and extrinsic sensors

In recent years, the research of multiple unmanned surface vessels collaboration has received great attention. More and more researchers have proposed different methods of multiple unmanned surface vessels collaboration, such as cooperative collision avoidance, formation, and rendezvous. Based on the significant advantages of biological swarm intelligence applications in these collaborative methods

Complete coverage, which is integral to many robotic applications, aims to cover an area as quickly as possible. In such tasks, employing multiple robots can reduce the overall coverage time by appropriate task allocation. Several multi-robot coverage approaches divide the environment into balanced subareas and minimize the maximum subarea of all robots. However, balanced coverage in many situations

The unstructured, dynamic marine environmental information and the cooperative obstacle avoidance problem greatly challenge the online path planner for unmanned surface vehicles. Efficiency and optimization are crucial for online path planning schemes. Thus, we proposed an algorithmic combination of the optimal rapidly exploring random tree and artificial potential field methods. First, we built a

Despite advances in modern control theory and artificial intelligence technology, current methods for tuning proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller parameters based on the traditional particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm do not meet the requirements for controlling an unmanned surface vessel (USV) propulsion motor. To overcome the disadvantages of the PSO algorithm, such as low precision

Nowadays, multi-sensor fusion is a popular tool for feature recognition and object detection. Integrating various sensors allows us to obtain reliable information about the environment. This article proposes a 3D robot trajectory estimation based on a multimodal fusion of 2D features extracted from color images and 3D features from 3D point clouds. First, a set of images was collected using a monocular

The horizontal thrusters located as X shape is a commonly used configuration in remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV). To improve the motion performance of the remotely operated underwater vehicle with this configuration for some typical operation tasks, a multistep thrust allocation method based on priority idea is proposed. Firstly, the thrust allocation result of every single force/moment among

Unmanned aircraft or drones as they are sometimes called are continuing to become part of more real-life applications. The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles in public airspace is becoming an important issue that should be addressed. As the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and their applications are largely increasing, air traffic with more unmanned aircraft has to be given more attention to

This article focuses on a novel three-dimensional reconstruction system that maps large archeological caves using data collected by a small unmanned aircraft system with red, green, and blue-depth cameras. Cave sites often contain the best-preserved material in the archeological record. Yet few sites are fully mapped. Large caves environment usually contains complex geometric structures and objects

Self-reconfigurable robot is a complex system composed of multiple modular robots. Aiming at high efficiency and low energy consumption of self-reconfigurable robot configuration transformation, a self-reconfiguration strategy based on module mapping of the common parts is proposed. This strategy describes the configuration of the robot in the form of a graph, and a method to determine the central

Visual servoing is a key approach to achieve visual control for the rotor unmanned helicopter. The challenges of the inaccurate matrix estimation and the target loss restrict the performance of the visual servoing control systems. This work proposes a novel visual servoing controller using the deep Q-network to achieve an efficient matrix estimation. A deep Q-network learning agent learns a policy

To improve the precision and reduce the movement uncertainty of the industrial robot, a novel hybrid optimization algorithm which combines adaptive genetic algorithm with simulated annealing algorithm is proposed in this article. First, for the sake of increasing the global exploring ability of relevant individuals, the adaptive crossover and mutation operator are used in the phase of adaptive genetic

Fan Z, Wang X, Wang Z, Gao S, Lin S. Distributed variable stiffness joint assist mechanism based on laminated structure. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. 2021. doi:10.1177/17298814211060661

In hazardous situations involving the dispersion of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear pollutants, timely containment of the emission is critical. A contaminant disperses as a dynamically evolving plume into the atmosphere, introducing complex difficulties in predicting the dispersion trajectory and potential evacuation sites. Strategies for predictive modeling of rapid contaminant dispersion

Applying a control system with low energy consumption and low load of motion control to robots, similar to living organisms, is considered to be one of the most important issues in robot development. We have been studying systems that use pulse-type hardware neural networks to control robotic motion with a small number of control signals, as is the case in living organisms. In particular, it has been

Forestry monitoring and high-voltage cable inspection demand on low-cost climbing robots. The proposed climbing robot has simple control and low cost, enabling loaded, which drives by a single motor. Based on the overrunning spring clutch mechanisms, two motions of holding and climbing are realized by one motor. A rope-driven gripper is for adaptive enveloping holding effectively and a thron wheel

This article proposed a simple and efficient method for relative localization of swarm robotics. Firstly, the relative localization module of the micro-robot is designed to be composed of a compass and several pairs of infrared transceiver sensors evenly arranged on the edge of the robot. Based on the existing relative localization method and combined with the relative localization module, an improved

Many robot manipulation processes involve large visual range variation between the hand-eye camera and the object, which in turn causes object scale change of a large span in the image sequence captured by the camera. In order to accurately guide the manipulator, the relative 6 degree of freedom (6D) pose between the object and manipulator is continuously required in the process. The large-span scale

As a new type of ground transportation system, an unmanned metamorphic vehicle can naturally switch between wheeled driving and legged walking through vehicle reconstruction. Therefore, compared with traditional vehicles, unmanned metamorphic vehicles can move quickly on structural roads and have high trafficability on nonstructural roads. Furthermore, an unmanned metamorphic vehicle is applicable

Recently, the learning-based LiDAR odometry has obtained robust estimation results in the field of mobile robot localization, but most of them are constructed based on the idea of supervised learning. In the network training stage, these supervised learning-based methods rely heavily on real pose labels, which is defective in practical applications. Different from these methods, a novel self-supervised

Sea cucumber fishing is an important application of underwater robots. In order to realize the function of sea cucumber fishing, an underwater robot system for sea cucumber fishing is designed, which can reduce operation requirements and costs while realizing sea cucumber fishing. The overall system plan includes the design of subsystems such as power supply system, fishing system, transmission system

In this study, a system for automatically picking mechanical parts required in the industrial automation field was proposed. In particular, using deep learning, bolts and nuts were recognized and geometric information of these parts was extracted. By applying YOLOv3 specialized in high recognition rate and fast processing speed, the recognition of target object, location, and postural information were

Limb disability is one of the serious problems and rehabilitation of lower limb requires an assistive force to the patient. A new design for stationary trainer for performing rehabilitation therapies for lower limb at the knee as well as hip joints in the sitting/lying positions is presented in this article. A passive orthosis (similar to an exoskeleton) is suggested in this system to provide a support

Traditional visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms are usually designed based on CPUs, and they cannot effectively utilize the parallel computing function of GPUs if they are directly transplanted to an embedded board with a GPU module. However, the computing power of embedded devices is limited. It is unreasonable for the visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping

Topology optimization is an effective method for the lightweight of collaborative robots. The extreme working conditions of the robot for the existing topology optimization approach are usually determined by design experience, which may cause mismatch between the chosen load boundary condition of the parts to be optimized and the actual maximum one. In this article, a kind of topology optimization

This article analyzes the forward kinematics and inverse kinematics of the seven-degree-of-freedom exoskeleton rehabilitation manipulator. Denavit–Hartenberg coordinates are used to model the forward kinematics, and the working space of the end effector of the manipulator is analyzed according to the joint motion range of the human arm. In the inverse solution of the seven-degree-of-freedom exoskeleton

For fruit picking robot, it is an essential prerequisite for achieving fruit picking using machine vision technology to accurately identify the fruits growing in the natural environment. This article presents a vision system of fruit picking robot to perform fruit location and three-dimensional model reconstruction. Firstly, combining the features of color and shape of fruit to reconstruct the actual

Position–velocity–time control mode has been wildly used in industrial application. And velocity planning is one of the most important factors to determine the performance of position–velocity–time motion. To generate smooth trajectory while satisfying the kinematic constraints of the devices such as the maximum velocity, acceleration, and jerk, a novel velocity planning method is proposed. Firstly

Social robots are increasingly used within public spaces, including museum settings. This quasi-systematic review identifies and synthesizes the evidence on social robots that have recently been deployed in museum settings. It specifically focuses on their intended purpose, their acceptability and factors important for successful human–robot interaction in this setting. Four databases (PsycINFO, SCOPUS