The article puts forward the new layout methodology of the multi-floor linear cellular manufacturing layout. The proposed equipment layout methodology not just breaks the conventional single-floor linear cellular manufacturing layout but also meets the layout requirements of the intelligent manufacturing workshop for the stereoscopic aisle manufacturing cell. The layout methodology takes into account

The cleaning of cement warehouse is a labor-intensive and high-risk operation. The applicability and cleaning effect of traditional work tools are poor. Therefore, most of the methods are manual cleaning, which is inefficient and prone to accidents. It is of great social significance and practical value to develop an intelligent flexible warehouse cleaning robot that replaces the manual cleaning of

This article presents an innovative wall-climbing robot for detection on smooth wall surfaces, which consists of a vacuum adsorption system and adhesion belts, making the robot flexible and effectively steerable. Moreover, the detailed attachment mechanism is further analyzed for the climbing tasks. Safe operating conditions, kinematics, and dynamic model are derived, respectively, indicating that

Scan registration is a fundamental step for the simultaneous localization and mapping of mobile robot. The accuracy of scan registration is critical for the quality of mapping and the accuracy of robot navigation. During all of the scan registration methods, normal distribution transform is an efficient and wild-using one. But normal distribution transform will lead to the unreasonable interruption

In this article, an autonomous robotic fish is designed for underwater operations like object detection and tracking along with collision avoidance. The computer-aided design model for prototype robotic fish is designed using the Solid Works® software to export an stereolithography (STL) file to MakerBot, a 3D printer, to manufacture the parts of robotic fish using polylactic acid thermoplastic polymer

Swarm robotics refers to artificial swarm systems composed of a large number of autonomous mobile robots with relatively simple structures and functions. One of the basic problems of swarm robotics involves the target search process, which entails a cooperative search using limited perception and local interaction of robots under a self-organizing mechanism. When communication is limited, the connectivity

In the field of visual perception, the edges of images tend to be rich in effective visual stimuli, which contribute to the neural network’s understanding of various scenes. Image smoothing is an image processing method used to highlight the wide area, low-frequency components, main part of the image or to suppress image noise and high-frequency interference components, which could make the image’s

The new technology of intelligent manufacturing makes the data of process planning and shop scheduling easier to interconnect, and the integration optimization of different manufacturing processes is an important technology to ensure the implementation of intelligent manufacturing. Integrated process planning and scheduling is a significant research focus in recent years, which could improve the performance

Real-time recognition of walking-related activities is an important function that lower extremity assistive devices should possess. This article presents a real-time walking pattern recognition method for soft knee power assist wear. The recognition method employs the rotation angles of thighs and shanks as well as the knee joint angles collected by the inertial measurement units as input signals and

To better monitor the state of isolating switches, an efficient binocular vision-based state measurement system is proposed in this article. Two optimal cameras are selected as the vision of our inspection system. Firstly, stereo calibration and distortion rectification are performed on acquired image pair. Secondly, to recover the three-dimensional information of switch, we propose a semi-global stereo

An advanced driving assistant system is one of the most popular topics nowadays, and depth estimation is an important cue for advanced driving assistant system. Depth prediction is a key problem in understanding the geometry of a road scene for advanced driving assistant system. In comparison to other depth estimation methods using stereo depth perception, determining depth relation using a monocular

When autonomous underwater vehicle following the wall, a common problem is interference between sonars equipped in the autonomous underwater vehicle. A novel work mode with weighted polling (which can be also called “weighted round robin mode”) which can independently identify the environment, dynamically establish the environmental model, and switch the operating frequency of the sonar is proposed

This article presents a dual-optimization trajectory planning algorithm, which consists of the optimal path planning and the optimal motion profile planning for robot manipulators, where the path planning is based on parametric curves. In path planning, a virtual-knot interpolation is proposed for the paths required to pass through all control points, so the common curves, such as Bézier curves and

As an information carrier with rich semantics, image plays an increasingly important role in real-time monitoring of logistics management. Abnormal objects are typically closely related to the specific region. Detecting abnormal objects in the specific region is conducive to improving the accuracy of detection and analysis, thereby improving the level of logistics management. Motivated by these observations

This article studies a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm based on agent action prediction. In multi-agent system, the action of learning agent selection is inevitably affected by the action of other agents, so the reinforcement learning system needs to consider the joint state and joint action of multi-agent based on this. In addition, the application of this method in the cooperative strategy

A strategy system with self-improvement and self-learning abilities for robot soccer system has been developed in this study. This work focuses on the cooperation strategy for the task assignment and develops an adaptive cooperation method for this system. This method was inspired by reinforcement learning (RL) and game theory. The developed system includes two subsystems: the task assignment system

This article is concerned with the close formation problem of multiple underactuated surface vessels in the presence of model uncertainties, roll motion, and environmental disturbances. To effectively address these issues, a novel control scheme considering roll stabilization is designed by combing terminal hierarchical sliding mode control with Lyapunov direct method, which can quickly ensure a small

For the inverse calculation of laser-guided demolition robot, its global nonlinear mapping model from laser measuring point to joint cylinder stroke has been set up with an artificial neural network. Due to the contradiction between population diversity and convergence rate in the optimization of complex neural networks by using differential evolution, a gravitational search algorithm and differential

This article focuses on the problem of optimal linear quadratic Gaussian control for networked control systems with multiple delays and packet dropouts. The main contributions are twofold. Firstly, based on the introduced maximum principle for linear quadratic Gaussian system with multiple input delays and packet dropouts, a nonhomogeneous relationship between the state and costate is obtained, which

As one of the typical application-oriented solutions to robot autonomous navigation, visual simultaneous localization and mapping is essentially restricted to simplex environmental understanding based on geometric features of images. By contrast, the semantic simultaneous localization and mapping that is characterized by high-level environmental perception has apparently opened the door to apply image

The unmanned surface vehicle has the characteristics of high maneuverability and flexibility. Object detection and tracking skills are required to improve the ability of unmanned surface vehicle to avoid collisions and detect targets on the surface of the water. Mean-shift algorithm is a classic target tracking algorithm, but it may fail when pixel interference and occlusion occur. This article proposes

The global navigation satellite system (GNSS) constitutes an effective and affordable solution to the outdoor positioning problem. When combined with precise positioning techniques, such as the real time kinematic (RTK), centimeter-level positioning accuracy becomes a reality. Such performance is suitable for a whole new range of demanding applications, including high-accuracy field robotics operations

Motivated by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, there is an ever-increasing need to integrated Cyber-Physical Systems in industrial production environments. To address the demand for flexible robotics in contemporary industrial environments and the necessity to integrate robots and automation equipment in an efficient manner, an effective, bidirectional, reliable and structured data interchange mechanism

In this article, an active collision avoidance based on improved artificial potential field is proposed to satisfy collision avoidance for intelligent vehicle. A longitudinal safety distance model based on analysis of braking process and a lane-changing safety spacing model based on minimum time of lane changing under the constraint of sideslip angle are presented. In addition, an improved artificial

Ant colony algorithm or artificial potential field is commonly used for path planning of autonomous vehicle. However, vehicle dynamics and road adhesion coefficient are not taken into consideration. In addition, ant colony algorithm has blindness/randomness due to low pheromone concentration at initial stage of obstacle avoidance path searching progress. In this article, a new fusion algorithm combining

To solve the problem of artifact and image degradation caused by incomplete angle projection, this article presents an incomplete angle reconstruction algorithm based on sparse optimization and image optimization criterion (SO-IOC). Firstly, the joint objective function model is established based on the projection sparsity and the natural features of images. Secondly, by means of the idea of alternating

As the development of multidisciplinary techniques and ever-growing demands, autonomous system has been widely investigated in a variety of fields. In recent two decades, autonomous surface vessels have gained increasing attention from both industry and research communities, previous related work mainly focuses on the design of maneuver controllers, most algorithms are under some specific assumptions

This article presents a mechanical design structure for hydraulic actuators using the principle of series-elastic actuator, considering the restriction of mechanical structure, weight and size, as well as the requirement of high joint torques due to the large payload. An articulated leg was designed to incorporate with two of these elastic elements symmetrically for each joint. Further, for the hydraulic

To solve the problem of understeer and oversteer for autonomous vehicle under high-speed emergency obstacle avoidance conditions, considering the effect of steering angular frequency and vehicle speed on yaw rate for four-wheel steering vehicles in the frequency domain, a feed-forward controller for four-wheel steering autonomous vehicles that tracks the desired yaw rate is proposed. Furthermore, the

Industrial cameras starting to play a significant role in current industrial environment and they represent a strong tool for robotics mainly in cases when they are combined with high-speed robots. However, there are still some difficulties in vision system integration. The capability of such system (e.g. assembly or technological system) depends on several factors, for instance, the camera position

Trajectory tracking control of autonomous underwater vehicles in three-dimension always suffers disturbances such as input time delays and model uncertainties. Regarding this problem, an integral time-delay sliding mode control law is proposed in this article with dividing the vehicle’s input time delays model into cascade system consisting of a kinematics subsystem and a dynamics subsystem. Based

This article investigates a difficult problem which focuses on the external disturbance and dynamic uncertainty in the process of trajectory tracking. This article presents a robust adaptive fuzzy terminal sliding mode controller with low-pass filter. The low-pass filter can provide smooth position and speed signals. The fuzzy terminal sliding mode controller can achieve fast convergence and desirable

With the development of economy, the research of urban intelligent transportation system is becoming more and more important. The research and development of plate number recognition system is an important factor to realize the intelligence and modernization of transportation system. It uses each car to have a unique plate number and recognizes the vehicle number through the vehicle image captured

This article studies coordination control of the multirobot system for target tracking problem with disturbances in time-varying communication environment. An adaptive sliding mode control is designed to complete the target tracking task with the effect of disturbances and continuously time-varying topologies. This means that the communication between the robots is not switching among constant topologies

There are abundant unexploited resources on the moon. Many countries are promoting the lunar exploration project actively. The lunar robot is an indispensable part of the lunar exploration project, and the path planning is the guarantee for the lunar robot to complete its tasks safely and accurately in the lunar environment. The goal of path planning is to enable the robot to find an optimal path from

Humanoid robotics is a complex and highly diverse field. Most humanoid robots have more than 20 degrees of freedom (DOFs) and may have up to several dozen sensors. Developing software for such robots is challenging because one needs to correctly integrate all the actuators and sensors to operate in a highly coordinated manner. We solve this problem for two state-of-the-art humanoid robots—Boston Dynamics’

The utilization of smart manufacturing and intelligent devices has greatly promoted the transforming of traditional industries.1 Thus far, many emerging computer technologies2,3 and sophisticated equipment such as the robotics4 and drones5 have extremely improved the production efficiency and reduced the cost of the enterprise. Recently, numerous excellent enterprises have invested various drones to

Underwater glider is a new type of ocean exploration platform which combines the technology of float and underwater robot, whose basic principle is to realize the gliding motion of floating up and diving by adjusting the size of gravity or buoyancy and the position of centroid. Underwater glider can carry out a large-scale and long-term monitoring task of marine environmental parameters in the target

The intention of this open-source software is to provide the community with a multipurpose, low cost, easy to build and use framework for robotic manipulation. This software was developed by the GRVC Robotics Lab at the University of Seville for Aerial Manipulation. For this reason, most of the hardware has been specially optimized to be used in aerial robots. Among all the specifications, the most

In the past few decades, robotics has experienced a continuous shift from applications in constrained industrial environments to those involving autonomy, interaction, and collaboration with external agents. The adaptation of the robotic devices to new tasks often presents big challenges in both cost and time. Thus, the capability of prototyping a new controller and rapidly deploying it to the target

Vehicle self-localization is one of the essential functions in advanced driver-assistance systems. The most accessible localization technique is the global navigation satellite system (GNSS). However, GNSS cannot always have submeter accuracy when the signal is blocked by surrounding buildings. Much effort has been made to increase the localization accuracy, including map-matching methods based on

The in-depth application of big data technology and mobile Internet has made the growth trend of image data become explosive. At the same time, humans generally acquire knowledge in different fields by perceiving external information. Therefore, natural images are a relatively intuitive way of information perception.1 According to the relevant statistics, the amount of information that humans obtain

A critical task of a mobile robot is to determine its pose (position and orientation) under the given environment map, which is also the basis of other type of tasks. However, the environment map does not exist at the beginning. When the mobile robots enter an unknown part of environment, they need to construct the map (3-D point cloud map, topological map, 2-D map) to satisfy their tasks through its

In recent years, environmental perception technology for robotic system has attracted a lot of attention from researchers, and most of the studies on it are focused on the space above ground. With the development of computer science, there are more and more environmental perception sensors developed for robotics and artificial intelligence fields, including radio frequency identification (RFID) with

Industrial robots are getting widely used in more and more industrial applications gradually because of their prominent advantages such as the low use-cost and high flexibility. Not limited to the simple jobs such as pick-and-place, they also find their niche in manufacturing operations such as deburring and drilling, which require special attention to the manufacturing accuracy.1

Since the advent of robots, its development prospects have become wider and wider, especially in many industrial fields, which greatly improve labor productivity and product quality, reduce production costs, reduce labor intensity, and improve labor conditions.

When facing the uncertain ocean environment, it is necessary to design an advanced controller for the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) based on the accurate model. Accurate AUV model plays a fundamental role in many applications such as vehicle dynamics simulation, navigation, controller design, fault detection, and diagnosis.1–3 In the identification of ship maneuvering motion, a dynamic model

An aging population and rising labor costs are acute challenges facing society, resulting in a high demand for indoor service robots. Service robots working in indoor environments, such as homes or offices, often need to handle a variety of grasping tasks that require the ability to recognize the target object in a complex or dynamic background environment.1,2 Due to uncertain factors, such as illumination

Floor cleaning robots are becoming an integral part of every household that could improvise the productivity and quality of life through performing repetitive and time-consuming task. It is estimated that cleaning robots could reach a market value of USD 4.34 Billion in 2023, wherein the floor cleaning robots will hold a more significant share.1 Even though the dominant market player iRobot, Neato

Modern mobile robotics systems can be complex and challenging to implement from scratch without a deeply knowledgeable and experienced team of researchers and practiced engineers. To build a production grade system, a company needs to draw from experts in path planning, perception, and control and could take years to develop. Today, with the advent of ROS and the associated open-source ecosystem surrounding

Piles, usually free-formed, are one of the important material storing and managing forms in the industry. The pile volume is of great significance to scientific management, economic benefit assessment, and storage capacity assessment. With the accelerating development of large-scale storage bases, modern management techniques for stock storage are required. However, current approaches to calculating

The harmonic reducer was proposed by Musser1 based on the thin-shell elastic deformation theory in 1953. Harmonic drive system offers significant advantages over conventional systems, including high positioning accuracy with zero backlashes, reduced size, reduced weight, and increased reduction ratios. Therefore, it is widely used in military, industrial, agricultural, and other fields, especially

At present, the optimal path planning for mobile robots is based, as a rule, on the analysis of the kinematics or dynamics of their motion. As optimality criteria, one can use various parameters, for example, maximal speed, minimal path length, minimal or maximal acceleration, the requirement to ensure the specified orientation, and their combinations.1–4 However, due to the specificity of applied

In the recent years, the indoor autonomous service robot has gradually become the research focus of many enterprises, with a very good application field and development prospects.1 Many start-ups have exhibited their indoor service robots, only a small number of them have the function of autonomous indoor navigation. Based on the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), the robot is able to “see”

Submarines are characterized by good concealment, long range, and strong penetration, these characteristics contribute to making it widely used. However, the crew avoiding danger remains to be a difficult problem because of the particularity of the working environment.1–5 Incomplete statistics reveals that more than 400 accidents involving submarines in peaceful environments worldwide have been reported

Referring to the marine problems, path following has been a mainstream direction due to military and civilian necessities in recent years. Numerous control methods have been designed to tackle with kinds of vessels and detailed practical difficulties, such as feedback control, neural network control, and adaptive control technique.1–5 The sailing vessels are mostly underactuated, as the rudder is usually

Quadrotors have numerous potential applications no matter for military or civil use. They present many advantages compared with fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) including high maneuverability, the capability to hover, vertical takeoff, and landing in limited spaces.1,2 In recent years, the missions of quadrotor are becoming more complex such as close range surveillance, detection, and commercial

Parallel mechanisms have some inherent advantages such as high stiffness, high precision, high load-carrying capacity, high force to weight ratio, and fast response speed over alternative serial robots.1,2 However, the small workspace and abundant singular configurations within the workspace limit their wide applications.3 Redundantly actuated parallel mechanisms not only inherit those aforementioned

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been widely studied due to the potential civil and military application values.1–3 As a key technology of AUV, target tracking control is very important to the task, such as underwater target reconnaissance and surveillance, intelligence collection, port defense, time-sensitive strike, underwater docking recovery, submarine pipeline maintenance, and halobios

Robot is a kind of programmable and multi-functional operating machine or a special system which can be used to change and programmable actions in order to perform different tasks.1,2 The task and goal of robot is to help human to finish the work better or to work under the condition of complex terrain and unsuitable environment. With more and more attention paid to the development of robotics at home