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Recent years have seen a technological change, Industry 4.0, in the manufacturing industry. Human–robot cooperation, a new application, is increasing and facilitating collaboration without fences, cages or any kind of separation. The purpose of the paper is to review mainstream academic publications to evaluate the current status of human–robot cooperation and identify potential areas of further research.

A systematic literature review is offered that searches, appraises, synthetizes and analyses relevant works.

The authors report the prevailing status of human–robot collaboration, human factors, complexity/ programming, safety, collision avoidance, instructing the robot system and other aspects of human–robot collaboration.

This paper identifies new directions and potential research in practice of human–robot collaboration, such as measuring the degree of collaboration, integrating human–robot cooperation into teamwork theories, effective functional relocation of the robot and product design for human robot collaboration.

This paper will be useful for three cohorts of readers, namely, the manufacturers who require a baseline for development and deployment of robots; users of robots-seeking manufacturing advantage and researchers looking for new directions for further exploration of human–machine collaboration.

This paper aims to develop an obstacle avoidance system for a multi-rotor micro aerial vehicle (MAV) that flies in indoor environments which usually contain transparent, texture-less or moving objects.

The system adopts a combination of a stereo camera and an ultrasonic sensor to detect obstacles and extracts three-dimensional (3D) point clouds. The obstacle map is built on a coarse global map and updated by local maps generated by the recent 3D point clouds. An efficient layered A* path planning algorithm is also proposed to address the path planning in 3D space for MAVs.

The authors conducted a lot of experiments in both static and dynamic scenes. The results show that the obstacle avoidance system works reliably even when transparent or texture-less obstacles are present. The layered A* path planning algorithm is much faster than the traditional 3D algorithm and makes the system response quickly when the obstacle map has been changed because of the moving objects.

The limited field of view of both stereo camera and ultrasonic sensor makes the system need to change heading first before moving side to side or moving backward. But this problem could be addressed when multiple systems are mounted toward different directions on the MAV.

The developed approach could be valuable to applications in indoors.

This paper presents a robust obstacle avoidance system and a fast layered path planning algorithm that are easy to be implemented for practical systems.

This paper aims to present an intuitive control system for robotic manipulators that pairs a Leap Motion, a low-cost optical tracking and gesture recognition device, with the ability to record and replay trajectories and operation to create an intuitive method of controlling and programming a robotic manipulator. This system was designed to be extensible and includes modules and methods for obstacle detection and dynamic trajectory modification for obstacle avoidance.

The presented control architecture, while portable to any robotic platform, was designed to actuate a six degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator of our own design. From the data collected by the Leap Motion, the manipulator was controlled by mapping the position and orientation of the human hand to values in the joint space of the robot. Additional recording and playback functionality was implemented to allow for the robot to repeat the desired tasks once the task had been demonstrated and recorded.

Experiments were conducted on our custom-built robotic manipulator by first using a simulation model to characterize and quantify the robot’s tracking of the Leap Motion generated trajectory. Tests were conducted in the Gazebo simulation software in conjunction with Robot Operating System, where results were collected by recording both the real-time input from the Leap Motion sensor, and the corresponding pose data. The results of these experiments show that the goal of accurate and real-time control of the robot was achieved and validated our methods of transcribing, recording and repeating six degree-of-freedom trajectories from the Leap Motion camera.

As robots evolve in complexity, the methods of programming them need to evolve to become more intuitive. Humans instinctively teach by demonstrating the task to a given subject, who then observes the various poses and tries to replicate the motions. This work aims to integrate the natural human teaching methods into robotics programming through an intuitive, demonstration-based programming method.

Cables are widely used, and they play a key role in complex electromechanical products such as vehicles, ships, aircraft and satellites. Cable design and assembly significantly impact the development cycle and assembly quality, which is be-coming a key element affecting the function of a product. However, there are various kinds of cables, with complex geo-metric configurations and a narrow assembly space, which can easily result in improper or missed assembly, an unreasonable layout or interference. Traditional serial design methods are inefficient and costly, and they cannot predict problems in installation and use. Based on physical modeling, computer-aided cable design and assembly can effectively solve these problems. This paper aims to address virtual assembly (VA) of flexible cables based on physical modeling.

Much research has focused recently on virtual design and assembly-process planning for cables. This paper systematically reviews the research progress and the current state of mechanical models, virtual design, assembly-process planning, collision detection and geometric configuration and proposes areas for further research.

In the first instance, the main research groups and typical systems are investigated, followed by extensive exploration of the major research issues. The latter can be reviewed from five perspectives: the current state of mechanical models, virtual design, assembly-process planning, collision detection and geometric configuration. Finally, the barriers that prevent successful application of VA are also discussed, and the future research directions are summarized.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the topics of VA of flexible cables based on physical modeling and investigates some new ideas and recent advances in the area.

Reports on an aggressive project to develop an advanced, automated welding system, being completed at Babcock & Wilcox, CIM Systems. This system, the programmable automated welding system (PAWS), involves the integration of both planning and control technologies to address the needs of small batch robotic welding operations. PAWS is specifically designed to provide an automated means of planning, controlling, and evaluating critical welding situations in shipyard environments to improve productivity and quality. Five varieties (wall, lathe, floor mount, cantilevered, and gantry) of PAWS welding systems currently exist.

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 of the UAV, in three dimensional space, using on‐board Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). Although capable of autonomous flight, the UAV is primarily intended for semi‐autonomous operation, where the operator instructs the UAV where to go. However, if communications with the ground station are lost, it can backtrack along its path until communications are re‐established.

A UAV has been designed and built using primarily commercial‐off‐the‐shelf components. Software has been developed to allow the UAV to operate autonomously, using solely the on‐board computer and sensors. It is currently undergoing extensive flight tests to determine the performance and limitations of the system as a whole.

Initial test flights have proven the presented approach and resulting real‐time SLAM algorithms to function robustly in a range of large internals. The paper also briefly discusses the approach used by similar projects and the challenges faced.

The proposed novel algorithms allow for on‐board, real‐time, three‐dimensional SLAM in unknown and unstructured environments on a computationally constrained UAV.