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This paper presents a review of published literature on robot reliability and safety. The literature is classified into three main categories: robot safety; robot reliability; and miscellaneous. Robot safety is further categorized into six classifications: general; accidents; human‐factors; safety standards; safety methods; and safety systems/technologies. The period covered by the review is from 1973 to 2001.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the underlying hazards of human‐mimic human‐collaborative industrial robots.

Preliminary hazard analysis is applied to a new industrial upper‐body‐humanoid under development. The result of the analysis is summarized by Fishbone diagram analysis.

Six hazard categories involving a four‐class physical human robot interaction hazard classification are derived from the analysis.

The method of analyzing hazards presented here and the hazard theory derived from the analysis can be used in other developmental projects.

This paper aims to explore augmented reality (AR) applications in construction safety academic literature and propose possible improvements for future scholarly works. The paper explicitly focuses on AR integration with Construction 4.0 technologies as an effective solution to safety concerns in the construction industry.

This study applied a systematic review approach. In total, 387 potentially relevant articles from databases were identified. Once filtering criteria were applied, 29 eligible papers where selected. The inclusion criteria were being directly associated with construction safety focused on an AR application and AR interactions associated with the Construction 4.0 technologies.

This study investigated the structure of AR applications in construction safety. To this end, the authors studied the safety purposes of AR applications in construction safety: pre-event (intelligent operation, training, safety inspection and hazard alerting), during-event (pinpointing hazard) and post-event (safety estimation) applications. Then, the integration of AR with Construction 4.0 technologies was elaborated. The systematic review also revealed that the AR integration has contributed to developing several technical aspects of AR technology: display, tracking and human–computer interaction. The study results indicate that AR integration with construction is effective in mitigating safety concerns; however, further research studies are required to support this statement.

This study contributes to exploring applications and integrations of AR into construction safety in order to facilitate the leverage of this technology. This review can help encourage practitioners and researchers to conduct further academic investigations into AR application in construction safety.

ROBOVOLC is a new robotic system that has been designed to help scientists in the exploration of volcanoes. It is composed of three subsystems: a rover platform with six articulated and independently actuated wheels; a manipulator arm to collect rock samples, drop and pick up sensors and sample gas; and a pan‐tilt turret with a high resolution camera, video‐camera, infrared camera and a doppler radar for gas speed measurement. This paper contains a short description of the system, following an introduction to the problem and review of the state‐of‐the‐art. Finally, results from the first test campaign on Mount Etna during September 2002 are briefly described.

Reviews the highlights of a two‐day European colloquium on information technology for climbing and walking robots held at the University of Portsmouth, UK, with progress reports on a Brite Euram project.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a multi‐robot solution to the problem of chemical source localization, in which a team of inexpensive, simple vehicles with short‐range, low‐power sensing, communication, and processing capabilities trace a chemical plume to its source emitter

The source localization problem is analyzed using computational fluid dynamics simulations of airborne chemical plumes. The analysis is divided into two parts consisting of two large experiments each: the first part focuses on the issues of collaborative control, and the second part demonstrates how task performance is affected by the number of collaborating robots. Each experiment tests a key aspect of the problem, e.g. effects of obstacles, and defines performance metrics that help capture important characteristics of each solution.

The new empirical simulations confirmed previous theoretical predictions: a physics‐based approach is more effective than the biologically inspired methods in meeting the objectives of the plume‐tracing mission. This gain in performance is consistent across a variety of plume and environmental conditions. This work shows that high success rate can be achieved by robots using strictly local information and a fully decentralized, fault‐tolerant, and reactive control algorithm.

This is the first paper to compare a physics‐based approach against the leading alternatives for chemical plume tracing under a wide variety of fluid conditions and performance metrics. This is also the first presentation of the algorithms showing the specific mechanisms employed to achieve superior performance, including the underlying fluid and other physics principles and their numerical implementation, and the mechanisms that allow the practitioner to duplicate the outstanding performance of this approach under conditions of many robots navigating through obstacle‐dense environments.

Describes a dual‐arm mobile manipulator that can autonomously scan natural terrain using a typical handheld landmine detector in a manner similar to a human operator.

Presents a terrain‐scanning robot that consists of two articulated arms mounted on an off‐road remotely operated vehicle. One arm carries a laser and four ultrasonic rangefinders to build a terrain map. The map is used in real time to generate an obstacle‐free path for the second arm that manipulates the landmine detector autonomously. The arms are mounted on the vehicle that is controlled by an operator from a safe distance. Motion planning and control of the robot is carried out using an embedded computer that is linked to a host computer to transmit the detector data and operator commands.

Finds that the terrain‐scanning robot can effectively manipulate a relatively large landmine detector on rugged terrain with undulations and obstacles.

Proposes real‐time motion planning that may be equally applicable to other mobile manipulators.

Provides a technology that together with state‐of‐the‐art landmine sensors will offer a safe solution for detecting hidden landmines and clearing them from the postwar countries.

Introduces the concept of a dual‐arm mobile terrain scanning robot for landmine detection in off‐road missions and civilian areas where truck‐mounted detectors are inefficient.

This work introduces the concept of a shape reconfigurable brush robot used for work in collapsed buildings or tunnels. This paper presents the bristle mechanism and traction experiments relating to a robot, which is designed to be able to negotiate pipes with variable cross section or ill constrained tunnel‐like voids within rubble. Traction experiments in the laboratory were used to investigate the characteristics of bristles and the performance of the brush units of different shapes. The experimental results are used to analyse the interaction between brush units and different shaped boxes and related to bristle characteristics with a view to give guidance for the design of a future brush‐based shape reconfigurable robot.