Purpose In large equipment and highly complex confined workspaces, the maintenance is usually carried out by snake-arm robots with equal cross-sections. However, the equal cross-sectional design results in the snake arm suffering from stress concentration and restricted working space. The...

Purpose An active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) based on model compensation is proposed in this paper. The method should first be taken a nominal model of the robot to compensate. Subsequently, the uncertain external disturbance is estimated and compensated is used an expansion state...

Purpose This paper aims to tackle the problem for a fully actuated unmanned aerial vehicle (FUAV) to perform physical interaction tasks in the Global Positioning System-denied environments without expensive motion capture system (like VICON) under disturbances. Design/methodology/approach A...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to designed a robot odometry based on three dimensional (3D) laser point cloud data, inertial measurement unit (IMU) data and real-time kinematic (RTK) data in underground spatial features and gravity fluctuations environment. This method improves the mapping...

Purpose This paper aims to address the issue of model discontinuity typically encountered in traditional Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) models. To achieve this, we propose the use of a local Product of Exponentials (POE) approach. Additionally, a modified calibration model is presented which takes into...

Purpose The study proposed a human–robot interaction (HRI) framework to enable operators to communicate remotely with robots in a simple and intuitive way. The study focused on the situation when operators with no programming skills have to accomplish teleoperated tasks dealing with randomly...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is that the modular mobile robots reformed the multimachine joint mode to achieve obstacle-crossing, climbing and other multifunctional inspection in unstructured environment under the connection of the cone–hole docking mechanism. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose Robots equipped with LiDAR sensors can continuously perform efficient actions for mapping tasks to gradually build maps. However, with the complexity and scale of the environment increasing, the computation cost is extremely steep. This study aims to propose a hybrid autonomous...

Purpose In the current teleoperation system of humanoid robots, the control between arms and the control between the waist and arms are individual and lack coordinated motion. This paper aims to solve the above problem and proposes a teleoperation control approach for a humanoid robot based on...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the growing role of robots in environmental monitoring. Design/methodology/approach Following an introduction, this first considers aerial robots for monitoring atmospheric pollution. It then discusses the role of aerial, surface and underwater...