Purpose – This paper aims to provide a review of the applications of robotic technology in laboratories. Design/methodology/approach – Following a short introduction, this paper discusses a range of key applications for laboratory robots and describes a number of products. Some recent...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) Conference and Show held in Washington DC, with emphasis on unmanned vehicles or service robots and their application on the ground, in the air and in the water....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the International Robot Exhibition (IREX) in Tokyo, Japan 2011, with emphasis on the new trend of the Japanese robot industry. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on in‐depth interviews with exhibitors and the reporter's...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and prototype implementation of a compact climbing robot with magnetic adhesion, which is only 8 mm high and allows for moving in any direction on the stators or rotors of power generators. Design/methodology/approach – After a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel application of the well‐established 2D laser scan‐matching technique for self‐localization of a walking robot. The techniques described in this paper enable a walking robot with a 2D laser scanner to obtain precise maps of...

Purpose – Different machines are already present in the human environment, easing human beings' daily life. In the future, this tendency will be accentuated by integration of numerous robots (e.g. wheeled robots, legged robots, humanoid robots, network sensors, etc.) in the human environment....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the radial basis function (RBF) networks‐based adaptive robust control for an omni‐directional wheeled mobile manipulator in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. Design/methodology/approach – First, a dynamic model is obtained...

Purpose – Recently, service robots have been widely used in various fields. The purpose of this paper is to design a restaurant service robot which could be applicable to provide basic service, such as ordering, fetching and sending food, settlement and so on, for the customers in the robot...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design a mobile robot controller which is able to pursue a given goal with obstacle‐avoiding capability in which the two tasks, i.e. aiming at the goal and avoiding obstacles, are fused together in a coherent framework of look‐ahead control method....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a CAD‐based human‐robot interface that allows non‐expert users to teach a robot in a manner similar to that used by human beings to teach each other. Design/methodology/approach – Intuitive robot programming is achieved by using CAD...