Robotics, Volume 14, Issue 8

The construction industry faces significant challenges due to the physically demanding and hazardous nature of tasks such as manual filling of expansion joints with mastic. Automating mastic filling presents additional difficulties due to the variabi...

Packing food into lunch boxes requires the correct portion to be selected. Food items such as fried chicken, eggs, and sausages are straightforward to manipulate when packing. In contrast, deformable objects like spaghetti can give challenges to lunc...

Trust in robots is often analyzed with scales built for either humans or automation, making cross-species comparisons imprecise. Addressing that gap, this paper distils decades of trust scholarship, from clinical vs. actuarial judgement to modern hum...

The paradigm of reinforcement learning (RL) refers to agents that learn iteratively through continuous interactions with their environment. However, when the value function is unknown, a neural network is used, which is typically encoded into an unkn...

Purcell’s three-link swimmers, characterised by segments connected through one-degree-of-freedom joints, exhibit a difficulty in following precise paths. This is attributed to their motion primitives, which do not inherently generate displaceme...

Generating robot behaviors in dynamic real-world situations generally requires the programming of multiple, often redundant degrees of freedom to meet multiple goals governing the desired motions. In this work, we propose a constraint-based controlle...

Ensuring the safe operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for both mission-critical and safety-critical tasks. In scenarios where UAVs must track airborne targets, they need to follow the target’s path while maintaining a safe d...

This study presents the design, fabrication, and clinical validation of a lightweight, body-powered prosthetic index finger actuated via metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint motion. The proposed system incorporates an underactuated, cable-driven mechanism...

Ants use their mandibles—effectively a two-finger gripper—for a wide range of grasping activities. Here, we investigate whether mimicking the internal hairs found on ant mandibles can improve performance of a two-finger parallel plate rob...

Disassembly is a crucial process in industrial operations, especially in tasks requiring high precision and strict safety standards when handling components with collaborative robots. However, traditional methods often rely on rigid and sequential ta...

Underwater navigation remains constrained by technological limitations, driving the exploration of alternative approaches such as polarized light-based systems. This review systematically examines advances in polarized navigation from three perspecti...

With the application and rapid development of light industrial robots, it is vital to accelerate the prototype design to fulfill the demands of shortening the robot’s production cycle, owing to rapid update iterations. Since the traditional des...

Robotic search of people in human-centered environments, including healthcare settings, is challenging, as autonomous robots need to locate people without complete or any prior knowledge of their schedules, plans, or locations. Furthermore, robots ne...

Two-wheeled self-balancing robots (TWSBRs) are underactuated, inherently nonlinear systems that exhibit unstable dynamics. Due to their structural simplicity and rich control challenges, TWSBRs have become a standard platform for validating and bench...

This paper presents the PRONOBIS project, an ultrasound-only, robotically assisted, deep learning-based system for prostate scanning and biopsy treatment planning. The proposed system addresses the challenges of precise prostate segmentation, reconst...