Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach to the design of an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to aid with the internal inspection and classification of tall or large structures. Focusing mainly on the challenge of robustly determining the position and velocity...

Purpose – Lane tracking is one of the most important processes for autonomous vehicles because the navigable region usually stands between the lanes, especially in urban environments. A robust lane tracking method is also required for reducing the effect of the noise and the required...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States), the world‐known basic and applied research facility operated by the US Department of Energy, was tasked with reducing the cost to produce titanium aluminide sheet metal used to cover the outside of military aircraft and...

Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – In‐depth interviews with exhibitors of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the 2008 AUVSI Conference and Show held in San Diego, California with emphasis on unmanned vehicles or service robots, their application on the ground, in the air and in the water. Design/methodology/approach – The approach takes the form of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a surgical robot for spinal fusion and its control framework that provides higher operation accuracy, greater flexibility of robot position control, and improved ergonomics. Design/methodology/approach – A human‐guided robot for the spinal...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report a collection of developments that enable users to program industrial robots using speech, several device interfaces, force control and code generation techniques. Design/methodology/approach – The reported system is explained in detail and a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new scout robot that tries to combine the hopping movement and the wheeling movement to greatly enlarge the scope of robot's activities. Design/methodology/approach – A five‐shank hopping mechanism was employed to build the...