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Reports on the opening, in May 1995, of North West Water’s new water testing laboratory in Warrington. It is the first automated laboratory in the world, with 85 per cent of the company’s water tests involving the use of robots and providing 24 hrs a day, 365 days a year production line testing. Uses standard industrial systems and robots and which have been customized to carry out more than 60 water sampling tests. Outlines the sampling procedure from collection through analysis to storage of the test results on a central computer.

It is said that one of the first recorded libraries of any magnitude was that of the Imperial Chou dynasty at Luoyang in the modern province of Henan in the 7th century BC, although the existence of libraries in China can be traced back to the Shang Dynasty about 500 years earlier. There is indeed said to be some positive evidence of documentation activities also going on in the 12th Century BC, since there are records of seismic activity dating from that time. Some three hundred years after this ‘first’ library, however, the infamous act of ‘Burning the Books’ took place. This was carried out on the orders of Shih Huang Ti — the self‐styled ‘First Emperor’ of the Ch'in Dynasty as a result of a petition from his First Minister to eradicate all earlier teachings. Not only did they condemn those who did not hand over their books, to forced labour on the Great Wall for four years, but also buried alive several hundred scholars who were suspected of knowing the books so thoroughly that they could reiterate their contents from memory. This act of ‘Burning the Books’ repeated itself of course during the Cultural Revolution as to a certain extent did a 20th century, although not necessarily much more humane, process of burying alive take place. The emperor was said, however, to have preserved copies in the Imperial Library, and especially those dealing with divination, pharmacy, medicine, agriculture and arboriculture. He also might, to perhaps stretch a point a little, have been said to have been involved in the documentation world, since he was apparently responsible for a wide range of standardisation including the track gauge of chariots — possibly to help him get the dimensions of the Great Wall right (from some parts of the Great Wall I saw however, a mountain goat would have problems let alone a horse and chariot).

The purpose of this paper is to report on new technology concerning multi‐arm robots.

The operating details of tread base multi‐arm robots are discussed. Comparisons to traditional robot are made. Application areas are outlined.

Tread base multi‐arm robots have higher throughput rates with lower speeds and accelerations than traditional robots. Distances traveled do not impact throughput rates.

This is one of the first discussions of this new patent pending technology.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel localization scheme using infrared identification (IRID) fused with encoder information.

IRID emitters are mounted on the ceiling in order to divide the floor workspace into sectors. Encoding the IRID signal then allows the mobile robot to identify which sector it is in. The sector information is fused with the dead‐reckoning results for estimation of the robot configuration based on the fact that IRID has highly deterministic characteristics.

Fusing the dead‐reckoning result and the IRID information bounds and in some cases reduces the size of the uncertainty. This enables one to more accurately estimate the robot's configuration.

A new artificial landmark, IRID is developed for mobile robot localization. This paper also demonstrates a framework that fuses the IRID information (deterministic) and dead‐reckoning result (stochastic).

The purpose of this paper is to review the 2007 AUVSI Conference and Show held in Washington DC with emphasis on unmanned vehicles or service robots, their application on the ground, in the air and in the water.

In‐depth interviews with exhibitors of unmanned vehicles and the providers of the technologies which are fundamental to their design and deployment. Also, attendance at conference presentations.

The unmanned vehicle industry is largely driven by government requirements, both military and civilian. Unmanned service robots are also found in commercial applications such as pipeline surveillance, crop monitoring and fish school location at sea.

Developers will be challenged to meet the need for improvements in speed, payload, sensor capabilities, autonomous operation and command and control of fleets of unmanned vehicles.

The paper offers insights into trends and new products in the unmanned vehicle industry.

The purpose of this paper is to build up a parallel robot for assembling, machining and repairing of the vacuum vessel of the international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER).

The process of assembling and machining of the vacuum vessel need a special robot. By studying the structure of the vacuum vessel, a novel parallel robot is built, which has ten degrees of freedom driven by water hydraulic cylinders and electrical servo motors. Kinematic models for the redundant degree robot have been defined. A prototype has been built. Experiments for machine cutting and laser welding were carried out.

The parallel robot is capable of holding all necessary machining tools and welding end‐effectors in all positions accurately and stably inside the vacuum vessel sector. The kinematic models appeared to be complex because of the redundant structure of the robot, and an optimization algorithm ensuring the maximum stiffness during the robot motion helps to find the solution in the trajectory planning. The entire design and testing process of the robot appeared to be a very complex task due to the high specialization of the manufacturing technology needed in the ITER reactor, while the results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed solutions quite well.

Offers not only a device but also a methodology for the assembling and repairing of ITER by means of a parallel robot.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between the role of front line managers (FLMs) and their contribution to the reported gap between intended and actual human resource management (HRM).

The findings draw on case study research using 51 semi-structured interviews with managers across two UK retail organisations between 2012 and 2013.

This paper argues that FLMs are key agents in people management and play a critical role in the gap between intended and actual employee relations (ER) and HRM. The research found that these managers held a high level of responsibility for people management, but experienced a lack of institutional support, monitoring or incentives to implement according to central policy. This provided an opportunity for them to modify or resist intended policy and the tensions inherent in their role were a critical factor in this manipulation of their people management responsibilities.

The data were collected from only one industry and two organisations so the conclusions need to be considered within these limitations.

Efforts to address the gap between intended and actual ER/HRM within organisations will need to consider the role tensions of both front line and middle managers.

This research provides a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between FLMs and the gap between intended and actual HRM within organisations. It addresses the issue of FLMs receiving less attention in the HRM-line management literature and the call to research their role in the translation of policy into practice.

Humanitarian de‐mining tasks require the use of specific detecting sets to detect landmines. These sets are normally based on a one‐point sensor, which must be moved over the infested terrain by a combination of a scanning manipulator and a mobile platform. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of the sensor head and the scanning manipulator.

The manipulator needs sensors in order to negotiate ground irregularities and detect obstacles in the path of the mine‐detecting set. All of the sensors must be integrated into a sensor head that is in charge of both detecting land mines and providing overall sensor functions for the mobile platform's steering controller.

The sensor head is based on a commercial mine‐detecting set and a ground‐tracking set based on a network of range sensors tailor‐made for this purpose; the scanning manipulator is based on a mechanism with five degrees of freedom.

The design assessment and some experiments are reported.