Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop an efficient method for solving a vehicle scheduling problem (VSP) in 2D industrial environments. An autonomous vehicle is requested to serve a set of work centers in the shop floor providing transport and delivery tasks while avoiding...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the control methods of the exoskeleton robotic arm for stroke rehabilitation. Design/methodology/approach – The robotic arm is driven by the pneumatic muscle actuators. The control system provides independent control for the robot. The joint...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design an integrated localization system for mobile robots in underground environments for exploring and rescuing tasks after incidents and detection of hazard gas in tunnels before ingress. Design/methodology/approach – An integrated localization...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the design and fabrication of magnetic couplings to use for vacuum robots. The permanent magnetic coupling (PMC) is appropriate for torque transmission in ultrahigh vacuum and highly clean environments. However, conventional structures of PMC...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a unified approach to uncertainty and sensitivity analysis for camera calibration. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is based on the fact that camera calibration is a problem of parameter estimation and the parameters of interest are...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new scout robot that tries to combine the hopping movement and the wheeling movement to greatly enlarge the scope of robot's activities. Design/methodology/approach – A five‐shank hopping mechanism was employed to build the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between automated assembly and mass production environments such as the manufacture of cars, airplanes and white goods and methods of modelling and simulation. Even in this environment high‐level automated assembly is...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present recent work designing a mechanical robotic hand for self‐adaptive grasping, human‐like appearance, which can be used in a humanoid robot. Conventional robotic devices are relatively complex, large, cumbersome and difficult to be installed...

Purpose – Shadows, the common phenomena in most outdoor scenes, bring many problems in practical image processing. Shadow detection and removal, especial in uncalibrated outdoor image, is still a difficult problem. The purpose of this paper is to detect and to remove shadows in single outdoor...

Purpose – The control of weld penetration in gas tungsten‐arc welding (GTAW) is required for fully automated systems to overcome variations in the welding process. The surface depression of weld pool, or weld pool height, has a close relationship with width of the backside bead in the...