Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a portable all‐position welding robot for the welding of intersected pipes. Design/methodology/approach – A complete procedure is adopted to conduct the design. The task and motion of the robot are analyzed and a mathematical description of...

Purpose – Some areas of the apparel industry, such as folding and sewing, are still labor intensive. The purpose of this paper is to present a new fuzzy visual servoing strategy for the folding of fabric strips by robotic manipulators. Design/methodology/approach – Three stages of the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe design and development of a pole climbing robot (PCR) for inspection of industrial size pipelines. Nowadays, non‐destructive testing (NDT) methods are performed by dextrous technicians across high‐level pipes, frequently carrying dangerous...

Purpose – The paper aims to provide a technical review of recent developments in microrobots, together with a less detailed consideration of nanorobotics. Design/methodology/approach – Following a brief introduction, this paper describes a number of recently reported microrobot development...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to realize a smooth and secure brake assistance system to avoid rear‐end collision of automobiles. Design/methodology/approach – It is important to judge necessity of deceleration assistance as early as possible and initiate the assistance naturally...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a device to support rehabilitation of a patient's upper limb motion. Design/methodology/approach – The device has five degrees of freedom by virtue of its link mechanism. It consists of Joints 1‐5. Apparatus for use in...

Purpose – Active contour can describe target's silhouette accurately and has been widely used in image segmentation and target tracking. Its main drawback is huge computation that is still not well resolved. The purpose of this paper is to optimize the evolving path of active contour, to...

Purpose – The Group of Unmanned Assistant Robots Deployed in Aggregative Navigation by Scent (GUARDIANS) multi‐robot team is to be deployed in a large warehouse in smoke. The team is to assist firefighters search the warehouse in the event or danger of a fire. The large dimensions of the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the local minima issue encountered in motion planning by the artificial potential field (APF) method, investigate the currently existing approaches and analyze four types of previous methods. Based on the conclusions of analysis, this paper...

Purpose – The paper aims to provide a review of the uses of robots in non‐destructive testing (NDT). Design/methodology/approach – Following a brief introduction, this paper considers the uses of robotic NDT, with an emphasis on applications in certain key industries. While some...