Purpose – In order to replace the conventional human maintenance of cable‐stayed bridges, a robot is designed and constructed for tasks such as cleaning, painting and rust‐detecting. Design/methodology/approach – Adopting a modular approach, two kinds of climbing mechanisms, plus a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper was to solve the shortage of carrying energy in probing robot and make full use of wind resources in the Antarctic expedition by designing a four-wheel land-yacht. Land-yacht is a new kind of mobile robot powered by the wind using a sail. The mathematical...

Purpose Autonomous obstacle avoidance is important in unmanned surface vehicle (USV) navigation. Although the result of obstacle detection is often inaccurate because of the inherent errors of LIDAR, conventional methods typically emphasize on a single obstacle-avoidance algorithm and neglect...

Purpose – This paper aims to propose a new method for combining global path planning with local path planning, to provide an efficient solution for unmanned surface vehicle (USV) path planning despite the changeable environment. Path planning is the key issue of USV navigation. A lot of...

Purpose This paper aims to improve the adaptability and control performance of the controller, a proposed seeker optimization algorithm (SOA) is introduced to optimize the controller parameters of a robot manipulator. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a traditional proportional integral...

Purpose This paper aims to develop a robot for tightening charged bolt to solve the shortcomings of high labor intensity, low efficiency, high risk and poor reliability in artificially tightening drainage board bolt of strain clamp for high voltage transmission line. Realizing bolt-nut capture...