Despite the poor state of manufacturing business, the WELDEX '91 Exhibition last September was the largest yet staged in this four‐yearly series, with 26 per cent more exhibitors occupying 7 per cent more space at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre than in 1987. There were 402...

An imaginative presentation of the past, present and future of robotics in Japan was held at the Science Museum in London during September and October as part of the Japan Festival. The past was colourfully represented by traditional wooden puppets powered by clockwork or, in one case, by sand...

More than 100 engineers and researchers from industry and from government and academic laboratories met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in September at the Fourth World Conference on Robotics Research, sponsored by Robotics International of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.

In the early 1980s, mechanical hands were little more than two‐fingered grippers, or quick‐disconnect wrists with different tools for each job. Today, thanks to engineering ingenuity, shrinking components and government funding for space station and other applications, they are becoming much...

Machine vision is helping General Foods subsidiary Krema to solve an innovative automation problem: the handling of floppy plastic bags of sweets. An environment where hard automation has always been the standard solution, the food manufacturing industry is now beginning to find that the falling...

Existing devices such as robots and machine tools rely on motion generators that have been developed almost entirely from existing technology, e.g. electric motors, hydraulic/pneumatic cylinders. Consequently, modern machines are attempting to perform increasingly complicated tasks by relying on...

Shape adaptive gripping techniques are becoming increasingly important in robotics as the handling of more delicate or irregular shaped objects are tackled. The use of compliance allows the acquisition of irregularly shaped parts to be made without the necessity of employing sophisticated...

Most of the business of Koltanbar Engineering is designing large automated welding lines producing body assemblies. In the past, designing a welding station for one of these lines was an extremely time‐consuming process requiring complicated sectional drawings at each welding point, which were...

Starting life as a technology‐driven educational robot manufacturer, UMI has grown into a market‐led robot systems supplier. The man behind it, George Novelli, talked to Brian Rooks.

Continuous‐path motion means moving a robot arm from A to B to C without stopping. Some of the concepts for generating such motions in present‐day robots are presented here, and in a following article. The emphasis is on day‐to‐day operation, path teaching, and recovery from anomalies...