Purpose – Planning and control of humanoid biped walking has been an active research topic for many years. But, there is no definite answer to the question of how to practicre‐examinedally achieve speedy and stable walking in real‐time and in a changing environment. The purpose of this...

Purpose – Structural integrity inspection of offshore wind turbine blades poses problems of gaining access to the blades, danger to human operatives and large costs of removing a blade and transporting it off‐shore for inspection. The purpose of this paper is to show that a climbing robot...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe an innovative compliance control architecture for hybrid multi‐legged robots. The approach was verified on the hybrid legged‐wheeled robot ASGUARD, which was inspired by quadruped animals. The adaptive compliance controller allows the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a portable non‐destructive testing (NDT) robotic arm that can be carried by climbing and walking robots (CLAWAR). The arm is required to maintain, during a scanning trajectory, a desired NDT probe contact force and orientation to evaluate...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present and evaluate methods of control and gait generation for the DLR Crawler – a six‐legged walking robot prototype based on the fingers of the DLR Hand II. Design/methodology/approach – Following the institutes philosophy, the DLR Crawler is...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a climbing cleaning robot with reasonably high productivities for vertical surfaces. Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyzes the reasons for the low productivities or unreliable work of cleaning robots for vertical surfaces. Based on...

Purpose – An earthworm moves by peristaltic crawling which brings a large surface into contact during motions and requires less space than other mechanisms. A peristaltic crawling is suitable for moving in excavated space by an anterior (front) of a robot. Therefore, a peristaltic crawling...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a novel multimodal approach to the problem of planning and performing a reliable grasping action on unmodeled objects. Design/methodology/approach – The robotic system is composed of three main components. The first is a conceptual...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present new locomotion and steering modules conceived and designed for rescue serpentine robots with enhanced climbing ability. The locomotion modules apply sock locomotion technology that allows great motion efficiency in rubble and confined...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a navigation system designed for highly dynamic environments which is independent from a metrically exact global map. Design/methodology/approach – A navigation system is developed to cope with highly dynamic environments. Here, this refers...