Robotics, Volume 9, Issue 2

We present an efficient and generic algorithm for approximating second-order linear boundary value problems through spline collocation. In contrast to the majority of other approaches, our algorithm is designed for over-determined problems. These typ...

This article examines the problems of multi-robot coverage and persistent monitoring of regions of interest with limited sensing robots. A group of robots, each equipped with only contact sensors and a clock, execute a simple trajectory by repeatedly...

The agriculture industry is in need of substantially increasing crop yield to meet growing global demand. Selective breeding programs can accelerate crop improvement but collecting phenotyping data is time- and labor-intensive because of the size of...

Learning skills from kinesthetic demonstrations is a promising way of minimizing the gap between human manipulation abilities and those of robots. We propose an approach to learn sequential force interaction skills from such demonstrations. The demon...

To effectively communicate with people, social robots must be capable of detecting, interpreting, and responding to human affect during human–robot interactions (HRIs). In order to accurately detect user affect during HRIs, affect elicitation t...

This paper proposes the design and 3D printing of a compact omnidirectional wheel optimized to create a small series of three-wheeled omnidirectional mobile robots. The omnidirectional wheel proposed is based on the use of free-rotating passive wheel...

Under special circumstances, a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) may leave its wrench-feasible-workspace. Standard approaches for the computation of set-point cable forces are likely to fail in this case. The novel nearest corner method for calculat...

Just as laparoscopic surgery provided a giant leap in safety and recovery for patients over open surgery methods, robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) is doing the same to laparoscopic surgery. The first laparoscopic-RAS systems to be commercialized were t...

This study was conducted to develop original benchmark datasets that simultaneously include indoor–outdoor visual features. Indoor visual information related to images includes outdoor features to a degree that varies extremely by time, weather...

Research and development in socially assistive robotics have produced several novel applications in the care of senior people. However, some are still unexplored such as their use as psychometric tools allowing for a quick and dependable evaluation o...

Smartphone technology is rapidly evolving, adding sensors of growing accuracy and precision. Structural engineers are among customers who indirectly benefit from such technological advances. This paper tests whether accelerometers installed in new ge...

In this paper, the inequivalence of the direct-contact mechanisms and their equivalent four-bar linkages in jerk analysis is discussed. Kinematic analyses for three classical types of direct-contact mechanisms consisting of: (a) higher pairs with per...

Robotics and Mechatronics technologies have become essential for developing devices/machines to support human life and society [...]

Accurately matching the LIDAR scans is a critical step for an Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV). Whilst most previous works have focused on the urban environment, this paper focuses on the off-road environment. Due to the lack of a publicly available dat...

(1) Background: in the last decade, various investigations into the field of robotics have created several opportunities for further innovation to be possible in student education. However, despite scientific evidence, there is still strong scepticis...

(1) Background: The technologies of Industry 4.0 are increasingly promoting an operation of human motion prediction for improvement of the collaboration between workers and robots. The purposes of this study were to fuse the spatial and inertial data...

This paper presents a survey on mobile robots as systems that can move in different environments with walking, flying and swimming up to solutions that combine those capabilities. The peculiarities of these mobile robots are analyzed with significant...

Developing dialogue services for robots has been promoted nowadays for providing natural human–robot interactions to enhance user experiences. In this study, we adopted a service-oriented framework to develop emotion-aware dialogues for service...

This article covers the signal processing for a human–robot remote controlled welding application. For this purpose, a test and evaluation system is under development. It allows a skilled worker to weld in real time without being exposed to the...

In this contribution, we develop a feedback controller in the form of a parametric function for a mobile inverted pendulum. The control both stabilizes the system and drives it to target positions with target orientations. A design of the controller...

There are many reasons why engineering structures are at risk of losing their loading capacity during their long-term exploitation, which may lead to hazardous states. In such cases, structures must be strengthened. The most popular technique of stre...

This paper presents an analysis of the geometric errors of joint assembly that affect the end-effector for a six-axis industrial robot. The errors were composed of 30 parameters that come from the Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) des...

This paper proposes a pressing method for wall-climbing robots to prevent them from falling. In order to realize the method, the properties of the utilized suction cup are studied experimentally. Then based on the results, a guide rail is designed to...

This paper describes an interactive storytelling system, accessible through the SoftBank robotic platforms NAO and Pepper. The main contribution consists of the interpretation of the story characters by humanoid robots, obtained through the definitio...

A bilateral teleoperation system can become unstable in the presence of a modest time delay. However, the wave variable algorithm provides stable operation for any fixed time delay using passivity arguments. Unfortunately, the wave variable method pr...

The design of Multi-Input Multi-Output nonlinear control systems for a quadrotor can be a difficult task. Nature inspired optimization techniques can greatly improve the design of non-linear control systems. Two recently proposed hunting-based swarm...

Locomotion over different terrain types, whether flat or uneven, is very important for a wide range of service operations in robotics. Potential applications range from surveillance, rescue, or hospital assistance. Wheeled-legged hexapod robots have...

This paper proposes a classification of all non-isomorphic anatomies of an orthogonal metamorphic manipulator according to the topology of workspace considering cusps and nodes. Using symbolic algebra, a general kinematics polynomial equation is form...

Augmented reality (AR) is used to enhance the perception of the real world by integrating virtual objects to an image sequence acquired from various camera technologies. Numerous AR applications in robotics have been developed in recent years. The ai...