Purpose – To report on the design and development of a robotic automobile aluminium frame welding system. Design/methodology/approach – The customer contracted with a team of suppliers, each with unique skills and products necessary for welding thin aluminium framing. The team employed...

Purpose – Aims to summarise the programme of UV Europe, a conference on unmanned vehicles that took place in Paris in June 2005. Design/methodology/approach – Selects key conference presentations and summarises their contents, indicating the main themes. Findings – Finds very strong...

Purpose – Aims to make an appeal to Japanese robotic community in an attempt to keep global competitivity for the future. Design/methodology/approach – Clarifies the cost structure of the robotic business. Analyses the needs of Japanese society. Leads to suggest the new direction of Japanese...

Purpose – Aims to make an industrial robot work human‐friendly while coexisting with humans in a same working space, without any modification of the manipulator hardware as well as its motion controller. Design/methodology/approach – Presents a weighted path planning approach based on...

Purpose – This paper aims to design a new full‐body tactile sensor which is essential for the application of personal service robot similar to human skin. Design/methodology/approach – The largest difficulty for designing a full‐body tactile sensor is the huge number of output...

Purpose – To present the design and control of a low cost, two‐wheeled, self‐balancing robot for detecting and reporting fire and intruders in a small home/office setting. Design/methodology/approach – Implement an intelligent control system to make up for instabilities of low‐cost...

Purpose – Service robots need to be programmable by their users who are in general unskilled in the art of robot programming. We have explored the use of spoken language for programming robots. Design/methodology/approach – Two applications domains were studied: that of route instructions...

Purpose – This paper reports a few results of an ongoing research project that aims to explore ways to command an industrial robot using the human voice. This feature can be interesting with several industrial, laboratory and clean‐room applications, where a close cooperation between robots...