Purpose This paper aims to provide details of a number of recent and significant agricultural robot research and development activities. Design/methodology/approach Following an introduction, this first provides a brief overview of agricultural robot research. It then discusses a number of...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the dramatic entry of collaborative robotics into applications. It also examines the current state of the art for collaborative robotics, factors driving their entry and their outlook for the future. Design/methodology/approach The paper includes...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design a special automatic redundant robot painting system (RRPS), which can automatically navigate and paint in the long non-regular duct. Design/methodology/approach – The RRPS is designed with three subsystems: a redundant robot, a spraying system...

Purpose – A large number of fastener holes have to be drilled with high quality in the circumferential splice region during the assembly of aircraft fuselage. The purpose of this paper is to design an automatic stepping mechanism for a circumferential splice drilling machine, to meet the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the path optimization method of the manipulator in the lunar soil excavation and sampling process. The current research is a practical need for the excavation and sampling of the lunar soil in the lunar exploration project....

Purpose The purpose of this paper is a description of DITCI, its drop loads and sensors, the impact tools, the robot dynamic impact safety artifacts, data analysis, and modeling of test results. The dynamic impact testing and calibration instrument (DITCI) is a simple instrument with a...

Purpose – Picking up pistons in arbitrary poses is an important step on car engine assembly line. The authors usually use vision system to estimate the pose of the pistons and then guide a stable grasp. However, a piston in some poses, e.g. the mouth of the piston faces forward, is hardly to...

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 engineer-turned-entrepreneur regarding the evolution,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the design and experiment of a universal space-saving end-effector for multi-task operations. Design/methodology/approach – The universal end-effector is equipped with capture and actuation transmission capabilities with two corresponding...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a dual-mode online optimization method (OOM) for trajectory tracking of the redundant manipulators. This method could be used to resolve the problem of the kinematics redundancy effectively when the manipulator moves in a limited space or its...