Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the direct kinematic analysis of a heavy‐payload forging manipulator. In the grasping stage, the manipulator is equivalent to a 3‐DOF under‐actuated mechanism. In order to deal with the direct position kinematics of the under‐actuated...

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a technical description of the robots that have been deployed in space, primarily on the Moon and Mars. Design/methodology/approach – Following an introduction, this paper describes the robotic devices that have been deployed on the Moon and Mars. It also...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent innovations in robotics for a wide range of medically‐related applications. Design/methodology/approach – The paper includes in‐depth interviews with developers of medical application‐related robots and a review of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the use of passive RFID technology for the development of an autonomous surveillance robot. Passive RFID tags can be used for labelling both valued objects and goal‐positions that the robot has to reach in order to inspect the surroundings....

Purpose – Stereo vision technique simulates the function of the human eyes to observe the world, which can be used to compute the spatial information of weld seam in the robot welding field. It is a typical kind of application to fix two cameras on the end effector of robot when stereo vision...

Purpose – Reducing energy consumption in walking robots is an issue of great importance in field applications such as humanitarian demining so as to increase mission time for a given power supply. The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of improving energy efficiency in statically...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a control system for a heavy duty industrial robot, including both the control structure and algorithm, which was designed and tested. Design/methodology/approach – An industrial PC with TwinCAT real‐time system is chosen as the motion...

Purpose – Precision aluminium moulding makes possible the production of large‐size, complex and high‐technology cast parts. However, industrial requirements linked to economic and safety reasons call into question the manual performance of finishing operations. The purpose of this paper is...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a calibration method developed to improve the absolute accuracy of a novel three degrees‐of‐freedom planar parallel robot. The robot is designed for the precise alignment of semiconductor wafers and, even though its complete workspace is...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the design and implementation of a zero‐initial‐velocity self‐motion scheme on a six degrees of freedom (six‐DOF) planar robot manipulator. Design/methodology/approach – In view of the existence of physical limits in an actual robot...