Industrial Robot the international journal of robotics research and application

Purpose This study aims to present and validate a hybrid motion–measurement control architecture and a traceability-oriented human–machine interface (HMI) for a three-DOF 3-prismatic–spherical–prismatic (3-PSP) parallel manipulator configured as a micro-coordinate measuring machine (CMM), improving stability, reproducibility and metrological traceability. Design/methodology/approach Control softw…

Purpose Wrist mechanisms are crucial for enhancing dexterity and load capacity in humanoid robots, but traditional designs often fail to balance load strength and maneuverability. This study optimizes a previously introduced three-degree-of-freedom (3-DoF) wrist mechanism using a 2PSS-U + RUR parallel configuration. The primary purpose of this study is to conduct multi-objective optimization of g…

Purpose The purpose of this study is to address roller-mandrel interference, abrupt orientation changes, and trajectory discontinuities during fiber placement on complex pressure-vessel surfaces. To this end, a trajectory optimization method based on Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) interpolation and S-curve velocity planning is proposed to improve trajectory continuity, pose synchronizatio…

Purpose This study aims to present a façade-cleaning robot for safe, efficient maintenance of high-rise glass curtain walls, combining active safety with a block-wise cleaning strategy. Design/methodology/approach The robot uses a modular Cartesian architecture with a synchronous-belt lifting module, worm-gear self-locking and multipoint vacuum anchoring. A distributed master–slave controller coo…

Purpose This review paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of Dubins robot path planning, which has become increasingly important in mobile robotics, autonomous vehicles and industrial applications. The authors identify key developments, analyze existing approaches and highlight the fundamental constraints, algorithms and future opportunities involving curvature-constrained, forward-only pa…

Purpose While existing 2D LiDAR algorithms can support mobile robots to perform localization and mapping in industrial scenarios, they often consume substantial computational resources, a critical limitation for lightweight robotic platforms. To enhance computational efficiency while maintaining localization accuracy, this paper aims to propose an efficient 2D LiDAR odometry algorithm based on th…

Purpose This paper aims to propose a novel methodology to mitigate welding torch vibration caused by sensor measurement noise during laser vision-based seam tracking, which compromises robotic welding quality. Design/methodology/approach A Kalman filter is applied to smooth the noisy sensor data for precise tracking. To avoid costly and inefficient manual tuning of the filter’s hyperparameters, B…

Purpose This study aims to address the challenges of robotic cloth folding, stemming from complex dynamics and high degrees of freedom. While existing learning-based approaches have shown promise, they often suffer from limited generalization across diverse fabrics and require extensive real-world data. To address this gap, we propose a perception-centric strategy introducing HrcbamFolding, a dua…

Purpose This study aims to address the degradation of localisation and mapping accuracy in visual simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) caused by moving objects in dynamic environments. This study proposes a lightweight SLAM method based on a hierarchical dynamic-object discrimination mechanism. Design/methodology/approach A three-layer pipeline is established: a pruned and quantised YOLOv8n-s…

Purpose This study aims to develop a variable stiffness actuator to overcome the limitations of traditional rigid robots in flexibility and the insufficient load capacity of fully soft robots, enabling adaptive and stable grasping of geometrically diverse objects. Design/methodology/approach A dual-jaw three-finger gripper was fabricated using 3D-printed polylactic acid (PLA), which exhibits ther…

Purpose This research aims to establish a global positioning system (GPS) waypoint–based autonomous navigation system with vision-assisted object detection to improve UAV performance in open environments. The goal is to achieve correct waypoint tracking, real-time perception of obstacles and safe payload delivery under diverse operational conditions. Design/methodology/approach The unmanned aeria…

Purpose This paper aims to improve the position regulation performance of pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) systems by developing an adaptive outer-loop control strategy capable of handling nonlinear and time-varying dynamics. Design/methodology/approach An adaptive single-neuron proportional–integral–derivative (SN-PID) controller is proposed, which tunes its gains in real time using a radial ba…

Purpose This study aims to address safety hazards and inefficiency in high-altitude operations on curved ship hull surfaces by designing a triangular-tracked wall-climbing robot. The robot enables automated and safer maintenance for ship exterior surfaces. Design/methodology/approach Existing design challenges for ship wall-climbing robots were analyzed. A modular lightweight structure, integrate…

Purpose The purpose of this study is to provide details of additive manufacturing technologies and their applications in a selection of industrial sectors. Design/methodology/approach Following an introduction, this study first provides details of additive manufacturing technologies. It then discusses and provides examples of applications in four industries: construction, aviation and aerospace, …

Purpose This paper aims to introduce an integrated planning method for the base position (BP) selection and its optimal visiting sequence for mobile manipulators executing large-scale construction tasks. The method ensures the overall optimality of the planning results through a bilevel coupled optimization of navigation cost and manipulation cost. Design/methodology/approach A two-stage methodol…

Purpose In high-precision industrial robotics, sudden changes in acceleration (jerk) often induce vibrations, increase mechanical wear and compromise accuracy. To address these issues, this study aims to introduce a jerk-minimized trajectory planning framework for a 4-degree-of-freedom (DOF) robotic arm, integrating root multiplicity directly into the inverse kinematics formulation. Design/method…

Purpose As an efficient path planning algorithm, MPPI has received significant attention in the field of path tracking and planning for mobile robots. However, traditional MPPI tends to fall into local minima under extremely clutter environments and thus generates infeasible control sequences. To address this problem, an MPPI control algorithm based on encoder-decoder LSTM is proposed to handle t…

Purpose This paper presents a cloud robotics architecture for greenhouse strawberry harvesting, designed as a two-phase workflow that decouples perception from actuation. This study aims to demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of cloud-based perception offloading in structured agricultural environments. Design/methodology/approach In Phase 1, the robot performs single-pass data collection,…

Purpose Robot demonstration data is of great significance for enhancing robot autonomy through data-driven methods such as imitation learning. High-quality robot data is mainly obtained through teleoperation. However, current teleoperation methods either have high costs, poor usability or insufficient support for wheeled humanoid robots. This paper aims to design a low-cost wheeled-humanoid robot…

Purpose Hexapod robots possess a diverse range of gaits, and dynamic transitions between different gaits are of great significance for enhancing the overall motion performance of the robot. Therefore, to address the problem of dynamic optimal gait transition, a gait transition strategy for hexapod robots based on reinforcement learning is proposed. The purpose of this study is to achieve a dynami…