Psychology and neurobiology nowadays provide a large amount of precise information on visual system function. This information can be used in the design of autonomous systems capable of learning and recognising objects and places important for survival in complex unknown (real or virtual)...

A new type of high‐level robot command library is presented, which can be viewed as a marriage between simulation and control. The library commands contain simulations of the physical abilities of the robots as well as having the ability to control the physical machinery. The control of the...

For the past ten years, the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) at Vanderbilt University has been developing service robots that interact naturally, closely and safely with human beings. Two main issues for research have arisen from this prior work. The first is how to achieve a high level of...

Currently, academic as well as industrial research investigates the design of social skills for a robot, which could facilitate the robot’s interaction with humans. Work in this area pointed out three important abilities required by the robot, namely the capacity for communicating, for...

Robot learning ‐ be it unsupervised, supervised or self‐supervised ‐ is one method of dealing with noisy, inconsistent, or contradictory data that has proven useful in mobile robotics. In all but the simplest cases of robot learning, raw sensor data cannot be used directly as input to the...

Flexible feeding is an emerging alternative to traditional part feeding methods. This alternative greatly enhances the versatility of a manufacturing workcell by using a robot manipulator and sophisticated sensing devices such as machine vision, thereby significantly reducing both cost and set...

A photogrammetric 3‐D machine vision system has been developed for industrial inspection and quality control applications. The system consists of several simultaneously operating solid‐state cameras and photogrammetric hardware and software. The same system has been adapted for robot...

Describes the use of a robot as a measuring system for checking the manufacturing tolerance of complex 3‐D assemblies.

Reports on the first ever automatic milking system, known as VMS, or voluntary milking system, which has been unveiled on a farm in Sweden. The article goes on to outline the history and development of VMS, and its current operating processes.

Reports on the exhibits and exhibitors at Manufacturing Week, which took place at the NEC, 10‐12 November 1998. It reveals that machine vision is the major attraction at the show with over a quarter of the exhibitors exhibiting activity in this area. A number of the companies who offer turnkey...