Purpose – This paper seeks to report on the US venture capital (VC) industry's data findings on robotics. Design/methodology/approach – An analysis of unique reports by the National Venture Capital Association and three interviews with US VC firms are presented. Findings – Since robotics...

Purpose – The snail moves by propagating traveling waves from tail to head. If it is possible to propagate a traveling wave in many directions, an omni‐directional mobile robot could be realized. The purpose of this paper is to develop an omni‐directional mobile robot using the locomotion...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a cost‐effective design for a new rescue robot locomotion module using the principle of a continuous sliding membrane to achieve propulsion ratio (PR) near 1. Such high PR cannot be reached by other locomotion mechanisms that have been...

Purpose – The project Climbing Robot Cell for Fast and Flexible Manufacture of Large Scale Structures seeks to modernise and take into the future the technology of the manufacture of large fixed welded structures. It creates a transportable manufacturing cell consisting of a team of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe how the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation (IFF) has developed the automatic façade‐cleaning robot SIRIUSc for use on the Fraunhofer‐Gesellschaft's headquarters, a high‐rise building in Munich, Germany....

Purpose – The non‐destructive inspection of large concrete walls (e.g. dams, bridge pylons) with autonomous systems is still an unsolved problem. One of the main difficulties is to develop a very flexible platform, which is able to move and inspect horizontal and vertical surfaces safely,...

Purpose – This paper seeks to present recent work demonstrating the feasibility of Microbots' mobility in rough terrain. Microbots are a new search and rescue concept based on the deployment of teams of small spherical mobile robots. In this concept, hundreds to thousands of cm‐scale,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the online localization of mobile (service) robots in real world dynamic environments. Most of the techniques developed so far have been designed for static environments. What is presented here is a novel technique for mobile robot localization...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe research to enable a robust navigation of guide robots in erratic environments with partial sensor information. Design/methodology/approach – Two techniques were developed. One is a robust node discrimination method by using an adaptive...

The Japanese robotic industry has been very silent in medical applications. However, changes in this can now be observed. Above all Hitachi, an electric/machinery giant, is trying to rebuild its robotic business by entering the medical robot market.