Robotics, Volume 10, Issue 3

Maintenance and inspection systems for future fusion power plants (e.g., STEP and DEMO) are expected to require the integration of hundreds of systems from multiple suppliers, with lifetime expectancies of several decades, where requirements evolve o...

In this paper, we present a novel concept and primary investigations regarding automated unfastening of hexagonal nuts by means of surface exploration with a compliant robot. In contrast to the conventional industrial approaches that rely on custom-d...

The field of robotics has been rapidly developing in recent years, and the work related to training robotic agents with reinforcement learning has been a major focus of research. This survey reviews the application of reinforcement learning for pick-...

The COVID-19 pandemic has critically impacted the health and safety of the population of the world, especially the health and well-being of older adults. Socially assistive robots (SARs) have been used to help to mitigate the effects of the pandemic...

The ability of an autonomous robot to adapt to different terrain affords the flexibility to move successfully in a range of environments. This paper proposes the Cylindabot, a transformable Wheg robot that can move with two large wheels, each of whic...

Software for robotic systems is becoming progressively more complex despite the existence of established software ecosystems like ROS, as the problems we delegate to robots become more and more challenging. Ensuring that the software works as intende...

The use of automation and robotics technologies for caregiving and assistance has become a very interesting research topic in the field of robotics. The spread of COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of social distancing in hospitals and health ce...

For the rapidly growing aging demographic worldwide, robotic training methods could be impactful towards improving balance critical for everyday life. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that non-bodyweight supportive (nBWS) overground robotic balan...

The static stability of hexapods motivates their design for tasks in which stable locomotion is required, such as navigation across complex environments. This task is of high interest due to the possibility of replacing human beings in exploration, s...

In this paper, methods of kinematic synthesis and analysis of the RoboMech class parallel manipulator (PM) with two grippers (end effectors) are presented. This PM is formed by connecting two output objects (grippers) with a base using two passive an...

Social robots may become an innovative means to improve the well-being of individuals. Earlier research has shown that people easily self-disclose to a social robot, even in cases where it was unintended by the designers. We report on an experiment c...

A drive to reduce costs, carbon emissions, and the number of required personnel in the offshore energy industry has led to proposals for the increased use of autonomous/robotic systems for many maintenance tasks. There are questions over how such mis...

Hybrid mobile robots with two motion modes of a wheeled vehicle and truss structure with the ability to climb poles have significant flexibility. The motion planning of this kind of robot on a pole has been widely studied, but few studies have focuse...

In this paper, we present a novel adaptation rule to optimize the exoskeleton assistance in rehabilitation tasks. The proposed method adapts the exoskeleton contribution to user impairment severity without any prior knowledge about the user motor cap...

This paper presents a study on the robotic harvesting of New Mexico type chile pepper, in a laboratory setting, using a five degrees of freedom (DoF) serial manipulator. The end-effector of the manipulator, a scissor-type cutting mechanism, was devis...

For robotic systems involved in challenging environments, it is crucial to be able to identify faults as early as possible. In challenging environments, it is not always possible to explore all of the fault space, thus anomalous data can act as a bro...

Automated vehicles (AVs) have given rise to a new field of study: human—automated vehicle interaction (H–AVI). Unfortunately, the H–AVI field has largely ignored the importance of context. To address this, this paper describes a socio-ecological view...

This article presents the design process of a supernumerary wearable robotic forearm (WRF), along with methods for stabilizing the robot’s end-effector using human motion prediction. The device acts as a lightweight “third arm” for the user, extendin...

In robotic teleoperation, the knowledge of the state of the remote environment in real time is paramount. Advances in the development of highly accurate 3D cameras able to provide high-quality point clouds appear to be a feasible solution for generat...

This paper presents a trajectory generation method for a nonlinear system under closed-loop control (here a quadrotor drone) motivated by the Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) method. Unlike NMPC, the proposed method employs a closed-loop sys...

The COVID-19 pandemic imposes an increasing demand for service robots as a substitute for humans to conduct various types of work in contaminated areas. Such work includes logistics, patient care, and disinfection, which can reduce the risk of human...

We study two nilpotent affine control systems derived from the dynamic and control of a vertical rolling disc that is a simplification of a differential drive wheeled mobile robot. For both systems, their controllable Lie algebras are calculated and...

The utilisation of robots in hazardous nuclear environments has potential to reduce risk to humans. However, historical use has been largely limited to specific missions rather than broader industry-wide adoption. Testing and verification of robotics...

The nuclear industry has some of the most extreme environments in the world, with radiation levels and extremely harsh conditions restraining human access to many facilities. One method for enabling minimal human exposure to hazards under these condi...

The transportation of large payloads can be made possible with Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) implementing cooperative strategies. In this work, we focus on the coordinated MRS trajectory planning task exploiting a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework...

Dynamic parameters are crucial for the definition of high-fidelity models of industrial manipulators. However, since they are often partially unknown, a mathematical model able to identify them is discussed and validated with the UR3 and the UR5 coll...