Purpose – It is widely agreed that amputees have to rely on visual input to monitor and control the position of the prosthesis while reaching and grasping because of the lack of proprioceptive feedback. Therefore, visual information has been a prerequisite for prosthetic hand biofeedback...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present powered‐wheelchair transducers and systems that provide more control, reduced veer on slopes, and improved energy conservation, while reducing effort. They are especially significant for people with movement disorders who lack sufficient...

Purpose – This paper aims to present a novel embedded‐internet robot system based on an internet robot agent and the brain‐computer interface (BCI) scheme. Design/methodology/approach – A highly flexible and well‐integrated embedded ethernet robot (eRobot) was designed with enhanced...

Purpose – This paper aims to give an overview of a dialogue manager and recent experiments with multimodal human‐robot dialogues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper identifies requirements and solutions in the design of a human‐robot interface. The paper presents essential...

Purpose – Achieving natural interactions by means of vision and speech between humans and robots is one of the major goals that many researchers are working on. This paper aims to describe a gesture‐based human‐robot interaction (HRI) system using a knowledge‐based software platform....

Purpose – To describe the design methodology and human‐centre functionality of the whole arm manipulator (WAM) developed originally at MIT and brought to commercial fruition by Barrett Technology. Design/methodology/approach – The WAM arm is driven by cable‐and‐cylinder transmissions,...

Automatic target recognition in agricultural harvesting robots is characterized by low detection rates and high false alarm rates due to the unstructured nature of both the environment and the objects. To improve detection human‐robot collaboration levels were defined and implemented. The...

This paper describes the technical principles of a high‐performance force controlled robot, called the HapticMaster. It is designed as a generic platform for applications with human interaction. Therefore, it differs significantly from most industrial robots on the one hand, whereas it also...

Since the 1960s many alphanumeric to tactile data conversion methods have been investigated, mainly with the ultimate aim of assisting the blind. More recently, interest has been directed toward the display of pictures on haptically explorable surfaces – tactile imaging – for a range of...

The Japan Robot Association (JARA) has been conducting standardization activities (ORiN: Open Robot Interface for the Network) in which the main subject is the network interface in the robot controller. In the 1999 international robot exhibition, our activities and results were opened and...