Purpose – Physician lateness and service interruptions are a significant problem in many health care environments but have received little attention in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to design appointment systems that reduce waiting times of the patient while maintaining...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach to the design of an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to aid with the internal inspection and classification of tall or large structures. Focusing mainly on the challenge of robustly determining the position and velocity...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel application of the recently introduced concept from computer vision to self‐localization of a walking robot in unstructured environments. The technique described in this paper enables a walking robot with a monocular vision system...

Purpose – Path planning in unknown or partly unknown environment is a quite complex task, partly because it is an evolving globally optimal path affected by the motion of the robot and the changing of environmental information. The purpose of this paper is to propose an online path planning...

Purpose – The scientific literature has played an important role in the dissemination of new knowledge throughout the past century. However, the increasing numbers of scientific articles being published in recent years has intensified the perception of information overload for users attempting...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new nested rapidly‐exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm for fault tolerant motion planning of robotic manipulators. Design/methodology/approach – Another RRT algorithm is nested within the general RRT algorithm. This second nested level...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a maximum speed algorithm for serial palletizing robots, which guarantees relatively low system modeling requirements and can be easily implemented in actual applications. Design/methodology/approach – Operation speed is an important index of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel application of the well‐established 2D laser scan‐matching technique for self‐localization of a walking robot. The techniques described in this paper enable a walking robot with a 2D laser scanner to obtain precise maps of...

Purpose – Recently, service robots have been widely used in various fields. The purpose of this paper is to design a restaurant service robot which could be applicable to provide basic service, such as ordering, fetching and sending food, settlement and so on, for the customers in the robot...