Purpose – The aim of this paper is to provide a review of recent developments in the application of swarm intelligence to robotics. Design/methodology/approach – This paper initially considers swarm intelligence and then discusses its application to robotics through reference to a number of...

Purpose – This paper's aim is to assess the practical advances resulting from progress in artificial intelligence affecting vision‐equipped robots. Design/methodology/approach – A short history of artificial intelligence applied to robotic hand‐eye coordination is followed by a...

Purpose – The paper aims to report on Toyota's violin‐playing robot and Toyota's strategy for its “partner robot” business for the future. Design/methodology/approach – The work is based on an interview with the R&D team of Toyota. Findings – The paper finds that, in view of Toyota's...

Purpose – This paper aims to present a novel embedded‐internet robot system based on an internet robot agent and the brain‐computer interface (BCI) scheme. Design/methodology/approach – A highly flexible and well‐integrated embedded ethernet robot (eRobot) was designed with enhanced...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the results obtained in the field tests of a new system for detection and location of antipersonnel land mines. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents briefly the overall system and then it focuses on the description and analysis of...

Purpose – This paper aims to give an overview of a dialogue manager and recent experiments with multimodal human‐robot dialogues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper identifies requirements and solutions in the design of a human‐robot interface. The paper presents essential...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to provide a new wafer prealigning robot for the photo‐etching facility during the manufacturing of IC products. Design/methodology/approach – The shape center is measured by a reflection‐style laser sensor in the wafer's radial direction, and the...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to describe how to make a co‐operative motion plan for a dual manipulator system to measure the radioactivity of wastes produced in decommissioning a nuclear power plant. Design/methodology/approach – The system consists of two tasks: the main task...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present the non‐model‐based multiple impedance control (NMIC) law for object manipulation tasks, which can be implemented with reasonable limited on‐line computations. Design/methodology/approach – The multiple impedance control (MIC) is a...

Purpose – Autonomous robot‐based finishing of surfaces with a reduction of the programming effort can be achieved by teaching the desired trajectory locally in the object reference frame. Thus, the flexibility of the programmed task increases and also moving surfaces can be finished. This...