type="main" <p>Using data from the 2010 UK general election, the article shows that there is a distinctive calculus of party choice among Britain's overwhelmingly Labour-supporting ethnic minorities. Ethnic minority (EM) voters are similar to whites in the importance they accord to partisanship and...</p>

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...