Robotic solutions for the handling of food products have been notably absent from suppliers’ catalogues and indeed from research laboratories. This is primarily due to the peculiarities that handling food adds to the general pick‐and‐place task. These are the complexity of handling...

Bringing a new robot to market is an exciting venture. When that robot is a new type of robot the venture takes on new proportions – it becomes an adventure. Dr Rob Buckingham, managing director of OCRobotics Ltd, describes the principles of a new snake arm robot that has applications in a...

Summarises the content of the IEE Tustin lecture presented by Professor Katsuhisha Furuta of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The work discussed is part of the $10 million super mechano systems project which concentrates on developing walking machines based largely on pendulae principles.

Purpose – The paper describes a pipe repair conducted in August 2004 using two types of snake‐arm robot. The pipe was located 5 m below the reactor core of Ringhals 1 nuclear reactor. Design/methodology/approach – The two types of robot worked co‐operatively to replace a section of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of snake‐arm robots to conduct inspection and repair operations within nuclear power plants. The systems that have been developed and deployed are described. Operational experience and results are provided. Inspection and repair of...

Examines Robofish, a prototype high speed, vision guided robot with an end‐effector that is able to grasp slippery fish and accurately place them within a deheading machine. Describes the vision system, the two fingered gripper and the robot which has two rotating arms. Outlines the software...