Robotics, Volume 6, Issue 4

With the rising popularity of robotics in our modern world there is an increase in the number of engineering programs that offer the basic Introduction to Robotics course. This common introductory robotics course generally covers the fundamental theo...

Hexapod walking robots have been widely addressed in the literature with a very large number of design and engineering solutions. However, specific design approaches and solutions are needed to cope with specific novel applications. This paper aims t...

In the last decades, increasing energy prices and growing environmental awareness have driven engineers and scientists to find new solutions for reducing energy consumption in manufacturing. Although many processes of a high energy consumption (e.g.,...

Outdoor environments pose multiple challenges for the visual navigation of robots, like changing illumination conditions, seasonal changes, dynamic environments and non-planar terrain. Illumination changes are mostly caused by the movement of the Sun...

This paper presents a robotic sensing system that evaluates the texture of gel-like food, in which not only mechanical characteristics, but also geometrical characteristics of the texture are objectively and quantitatively evaluated. When a human che...

The field of in-pipe robotics covers a vast and varied number of approaches to the inspection of pipelines with robots specialising in pipes ranging anywhere from 10 mm to 1200 mm in diameter. Many of these developed systems focus on overcoming in-pi...

This paper proposes an adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) to improve the performance of a vision-based human machine interface (HMI) applied to a video game. The HMI identifies head gestures and decodes them into corresponding commands. Face detection and...

Autonomous mobile robots have recently become a popular solution for automating cleaning tasks. In one application, the robot cleans a floor space by traversing and covering it completely. While fulfilling its task, such a robot may create a map of i...

The use of air propulsion to drive limb motion in soft robotics has been a largely untapped field even though the technology has been around since the 1700s. Air propulsion can generate greater degrees of motion in limb actuators compared to widely-e...

This work deals with the development of a node-based monocular visual methodology for autonomous vehicle navigation which has the goal of exploring unknown regions of the sea bottom with a posterior safe revisiting of them. The work accentuates chara...

Visual methods have many applications in mobile robotics problems, such as localization, navigation, and mapping. Some methods require that the robot moves in a plane without tilting. This planar-motion assumption simplifies the problem, and can lead...

Automation in cherry harvesting is essential to reduce the demand for seasonal labor for cherry picking and reduce the cost of production. The mechanical shaking of tree branches is one of the widely studied and used techniques for harvesting small t...

Biomimetic robotic fish is a new type of underwater robot with many superior characteristics such as high movement speed, high motion efficiency, high energy efficiency, and so on. However, the traditional kinematic model for biomimetic robotic fish...

This paper presents a comparative study on the effects of grid resolution, vehicle velocity, and wind vector fields on the trajectory planning of unmanned airships. A wavefront expansion trajectory planner that minimizes a multi-objective cost functi...

Modular robots are capable of forming primitive shapes such as lattice and chain structures with the additional flexibility of distributed sensing. The biomimetic structures developed using such modular units provides ease of replacement and reconfig...

This work presents the solutions adopted for the design and the implementation of an autonomous wheeled robot developed for the exploration and mapping of air ventilation ducts. The hardware is based on commercial off-the-shelf devices, including sen...

Existing self-reconfigurable robots achieve connections and disconnections by a separate drive of the docking system. In this paper, we present a new docking system with which the connections and disconnections are driven by locomotion actuators, wit...

This paper presents a novel and modular approach to agricultural robots. Food production is highly diverse in several aspects. Even farms that grow the same crops may differ in topology, infrastructure, production method, and so on. Modular robots he...

Learning control for robotic manipulators has been developed over the past decade and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is still in its infant development stage; the authors believe that it will become one of the most promising directions in...

This paper reviews recent developments in the emerging field of resilient robots and the related robots that share common concerns with them, such as self-reconfigurable robots. This paper addresses the identity of the resilient robots by distinguish...