Industrial Robot: Volume 49 Issue 4

Guest editorial: Dexterous manipulation

Bin Fang, Qiang Li , Fei Chen, Weiwei Wan

A humanoid robotic hand capable of internal assembly and measurement in spacesuit gloves

Rui Bai, Rongjie Kang, Kun Shang, Chenghao Yang, Zhao Tang, Ruiqin Wang, Jian S. Dai

To identify the dexterity of spacesuit gloves, they need to undergo bending tests in the development process. The ideal way is to place a humanoid robotic hand into the spacesuit…

Soft actuator using sponge units with constrained film and layer jamming

Xiaoyi Liu, Zehao Liang

This paper aims to propose a soft actuator that combines a sponge-based actuating structure and a layer-jamming-based stiffness-improving structure in a cavity.

Multimode fusion perception for transparent glass recognition

Shixin Zhang, Jianhua Shan, Fuchun Sun, Bin Fang, Yiyong Yang

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel tactile sensor and a visual-tactile recognition framework to reduce the uncertainty of the visual recognition of transparent…

An intelligent control system for robot massaging with uncertain skin characteristics

Jingmei Zhai, Xianwen Zeng, Ziqing Su

To ensure accurate position and force control of massage robot working on human body with unknown skin characteristics, this study aims to propose a novel intelligent impedance…

A cascaded CNN-based method for monocular vision robotic grasping

Xiaojun Wu, Peng Li, Jinghui Zhou, Yunhui Liu

Scattered parts are laid randomly during the manufacturing process and have difficulty to recognize and manipulate. This study aims to complete the grasp of the scattered parts by…

DoraHand: a novel dexterous hand with tactile sensing finger module

Tao Wang, Zheng Xie, Yuan Li, Yan Zhang, Hao Zhang, Frank Kirchner

This study aims to introduce the DoraHand, and the basic capability and performance have been verified in this paper. Besides the idea of sharing modular design and sensor design…

The role of robots in entertainment

Robert Bogue

This study aims to provide an insight into the role of robots in the entertainment industry.

Comparative analysis of three categories of four-DOFs exoskeleton mechanism based on relative movement offsets

Qiang Cao, Jianfeng Li, Mingjie Dong

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate three categories of four-degrees of freedom (4-DOFs) upper limb rehabilitation exoskeleton mechanisms from the perspective of relative…

An overview of pruning and harvesting manipulators

Vítor Tinoco, Manuel F. Silva, Filipe N. Santos, António Valente, Luís F. Rocha, Sandro A. Magalhães, Luis C. Santos

The motivation for robotics research in the agricultural field has sparked in consequence of the increasing world population and decreasing agricultural labor availability. This…

Research on the integrated manipulator of point cloud measurement and precise cutting for waste nuclear tank

Ruolong Qi, Wenfeng Liang

Nuclear waste tanks need to be cut into pieces before they can be safely disposed of, but the cutting process produces a large amount of aerosols with radiation, which is very…

Real-time trajectory tracking control of Stewart platform using fractional order fuzzy PID controller optimized by particle swarm algorithm

Zafer Bingul, Oguzhan Karahan

The purpose of this paper is to address a fractional order fuzzy PID (FOFPID) control approach for solving the problem of enhancing high precision tracking performance and…

Robust trajectory tracking control of underactuated unmanned surface vehicles with exponential stability: theory and experimental validation

Rui Yu, Hua Zhou

Trajectory tracking is an important issue to underactuated unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). However, parametric uncertainties and environmental disturbances bring great…

Error compensation based on surface reconstruction for industrial robot on two-dimensional manifold

Guanhua Li, Wei Dong Zhu, Huiyue Dong, Yinglin Ke

This paper aims to present error compensation based on surface reconstruction to improve the positioning accuracy of industrial robots.

Archive access robot for smart archive repositories

Jianwei Cui, Linwei Cui, Huice Jiang

Managing archives using robots rather than people can considerably enhance efficiency, while need to modify the structure of archive shelves or installation tracks. This paper…

Spherical robot with spring energy storage type hopping mechanisms: design, dynamics and experimental evaluation

Yangyang Dong, Tongle Zhang, Shaojie Han, Yipan Guo, Bo Zeng, Yongbin Wang, Zijian Zhang

Spherical robot plays an essential role in the field of mobile robot because of its unique shape and omni-directional mobility, especially in the application of planet detection…

Laser vision seam tracking system based on proximal policy optimization

Yanbiao Zou, Hengchang Zhou

This paper aims to propose a weld seam tracking method based on proximal policy optimization (PPO).

A CPG-based gait planning and motion performance analysis for quadruped robot

ShunXiang Wei, Haibo Wu, Liang Liu, YiXiao Zhang, Jiang Chen, Quanfeng Li

To achieve stable gait planning and enhance the motion performance of quadruped robot, this paper aims to propose a motion control strategy based on central pattern generator…

Estimation of the hydrodynamic parameters of USVs for velocity prediction using a hybrid adaptive strategy

Rui Yu, Hua Zhou, Siyu Ma, Guifu Luo, Mingwei Lin

Hydrodynamic parameter estimation is significant for the velocity prediction of unmanned surface vehicles. Considering the field data’s uncertain nonlinearities (environmental…