Robotics, Volume 12, Issue 2

Software verification is an important approach to establishing the reliability of critical systems. One important area of application is in the field of robotics, as robots take on more tasks in both day-to-day areas and highly specialised domains. O...

Humans often demonstrate diverse behaviors due to their personal preferences, for instance, related to their individual execution style or personal margin for safety. In this paper, we consider the problem of integrating both path and velocity prefer...

A challenge for inspecting transmission power lines with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is to precisely determine their position and orientation, considering that the geo-location of these elements via GPS often needs to be more consistent. Therefor...

A shape memory polymer (SMP) has been intensively researched in terms of its exceptional reversible dry adhesive characteristics and related smart adhesive applications over the last decade. However, its unique adhesive properties have rarely been ta...

With the occurrence of pandemics, such as COVID-19, which lead to social isolation, there is a need for home rehabilitation procedures without the direct supervision of health professionals. The great difficulty of treatment at home is the cost of th...

In this paper, we investigated the idea of including mobile robots as complementary machinery to tractors in an agricultural context. The main idea is not to replace the human farmer, but to augment his/her capabilities by deploying mobile robots as...

Tensegrity robots offer several advantageous features, such as being hyper-redundant, lightweight, shock-resistant, and incorporating wire-driven structures. Despite these benefits, tensegrity structures are also recognized for their complexity, whic...

Children with autism face challenges in various skills (e.g., communication and social) and they exhibit challenging behaviours. These challenging behaviours represent a challenge to their families, therapists, and caregivers, especially during thera...

Industrial robots are capable of performing automated tasks repeatedly, reliably and accurately. However, in some scenarios, human-in-the-loop control is required. In this case, having an intuitive system for moving the robot within the working envir...

Simulation platforms are critical and indispensable tools for application developments of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) because the UAVs are generally costly, have certain requirements for the test environment, and need professional licensed operat...

Continuum robots are increasingly used in medical applications and the master–slave-based architectures are still the most important mode of operation in human–machine interaction. However, the existing master control devices are not full...

The present work proposes the use of a hybrid controller combining concepts of a PID controller with LQR and a feedforward gain to control the positioning of a 2 DOF robotic arm with flexible joints subject to non-ideal excitations. To characterize t...

This article presents the analysis of a parallel mechanism of type 3-SPS-U. The usual singularity approach is carried out with respect to the Euler angles of the universal joint. However, this approach is computationally expensive especially when sta...

This paper presents a Runtime Verification (RV) approach for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) using the JaCaMo framework. Our objective is to bring a layer of security to the MAS. This is achieved keeping in mind possible safety-critical uses of the MAS, su...

Social robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology, providing a wide range of services and applications in various domains, such as healthcare, education, and entertainment. However, most existing social robotics pl...

Recently, with the in-depth development of Industry 4.0 worldwide, mobile robots have become a research hotspot. Indoor localization has become a key component in many fields and the basis for all actions of mobile robots. This paper screened 147 pap...

Automating a factory where robots are involved is neither trivial nor cheap. Engineering the factory automation process in such a way that return of interest is maximized and risk for workers and equipment is minimized is hence, of paramount importan...

Robotics and intelligent systems are intricately connected, each exploring their respective capabilities and moving towards a common goal [...]

Nowadays, many people around the world cannot walk perfectly because of their knee problems. A knee-assistive device is one option to support walking for those with low or not enough knee muscle forces. Many research studies have created knee devices...

With power comes responsibility: as robots become more advanced and prevalent, the role they will play in human society becomes increasingly important. Given that violence is an important problem, the question emerges if robots could defend people, e...

Multi-legged robots, such as hexapods, have great potential to navigate challenging terrain. However, their design and control are usually much more complex and energy-demanding compared to wheeled robots. This paper presents a wheeled six-legged rob...

Vision-based pose detection and grasping complex-shaped and thin objects are challenging tasks. We propose an architecture that integrates the Generative Grasping Convolutional Neural Network (GG-CNN) with depth recognition to identify a suitable gra...

This paper presents the development of a type-2 evolving fuzzy control system (T2-EFCS) to facilitate self-learning (either from scratch or from a certain predefined rule). Our system has two major learning stages, namely, structure learning and para...

High-quality maps are pertinent to performing tasks requiring precision interaction with the environment. Current challenges with creating a high-precision map come from the need for both high pose accuracy and scan accuracy, and the goal of reliable...

The bat algorithm (BA) is a nature inspired algorithm which is mimicking the bio-sensing characteristics of bats, known as echolocation. This paper suggests a Bat-based meta-heuristic for the inverse kinematics problem of a robotic arm. An intrinsica...

In recent years, the emergence of Industry 4.0 technologies has introduced manufacturing disruptions that necessitate the development of accompanying socio-technical solutions. There is growing interest for manufacturing enterprises to embrace the dr...

The spread of cobotsin common industrial practice has led constructors to prefer the development of collaborative features that are necessary to prevent injuries to operators over the realization of simple kinematic structures for which the joints-to...

For autonomous legged robots to be deployed in practical scenarios, they need to perform perception, motion planning, and locomotion control. Since robots have limited computing capabilities, it is important to realize locomotion control with simple...

Ballbots are omnidirectional robots in which a robot chassis is built and balanced on top of a ball, thereby allowing for a highly manoeuvrable platform on a planar surface. However, the stability of such robots is performed dynamically with the use...

Sheet metal parts can often replace milled components, strongly improving the buy-to-fly ratio in the aeronautical sector. However, the sheet metal forming of complex parts traditionally requires expensive tooling, which is usually prohibitive for lo...

The ankle is formed by several joints, and it is the union of the lower leg with the foot. Its main function is to perform dorsiflexion and plantar flexion movements. Many people are affected by ankle problems. These problems can be due to simple fac...

Displacements of the base during trajectory tracking are a common issue in the control of aerial manipulators. These are caused by reaction torques transferred to the base due to the manipulator motion and, in particular, to the motion of its center...

Robots are increasingly being employed for diverse applications where they must work and coexist with humans. The trust in human–robot collaboration (HRC) is a critical aspect of any shared-task performance for both the human and the robot. The...