Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review some of the various worldwide projects to develop and apply innovative swarm-type robots to many challenging applications. Design/methodology/approach – An in-depth review of published information and interviews with researchers and developers...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to solve the ground verification and test method for space robot system capturing the target satellite based on visual servoing with time-delay in 3-dimensional space prior to space robot being launched. Design/methodology/approach – To implement the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel control approach for swift and accurate positioning and tracking of a mobile robot. Coordinated movement of the mobile robot-body and chameleon-inspired binocular “negative correlation” visual system (CIBNCVS) with neck has rarely...

Purpose – This paper aims to introduce a compact and low-cost robotized system and corresponding processing method for automatically identifying and de-stacking circulation boxes under natural stacking status. Design/methodology/approach – The whole system is composed of an industrial robot,...

Purpose – Calibrating kinematic parameters is one of the efficient ways to improve the robot's positioning accuracy. A method based on the product-of-exponential (POE) formula to calibrate the kinematic parameters of serial industrial robots is proposed. The paper aims to discuss these issues....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a localizability-based particle filtering localization algorithm for mobile robots to maintain localization accuracy in the high-occluded and dynamic environments with moving people. Design/methodology/approach – First, the localizability of...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to present a variable stiffness actuator, one of whose main features is that the compliant elements simultaneously allow measuring of the torque exerted by the joint. Conceived as a force-controlled actuator, this actuator with Adjustable Rigidity and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the dramatic entry of robotics into the field of architecture and construction. Design/methodology/approach – Discussions with worldwide researchers in the field of applying robotics to architecture applications and attendance at the 2014...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the synthesis and experimental application of a generalized predictive control (GPC) technique on an Orthoglide robot. Design/methodology/approach – The control strategy is composed of two control loops. The inner loop aims at linearizing the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a vision-based method for the kinematic calibration of a six-degrees-of-freedom parallel robot named Hexa using only one Universal Serial Bus (USB) camera and a chess pattern installed on the robot's mobile platform. Such an approach avoids...