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Aims to measure the development and performance of a sensor‐augmented industrial robotic system for handling steel bearing races in an unstructured environment.

Performs exhaustive experimentation during installation of the robotic system to assess its performance capability in terms of average lifting capacity and cycle time of operation.

Reveals that improvement can be achieved without damping, though rubber padding still appears to be useful sometimes in higher speed operations. Also unloading operations appear to cause more trouble than loading.

The introduction of the robotic system will culminate in lower cycle time, increased productivity and optimal utilization of the annealing furnace.

Will be beneficial for those involved in material handling operations in an unstructured environment as opposed to more familiar conditions.

In advanced robotics applications in unstructured environments (e.g. those foreseen in space) some degree of dexterity and autonomy is necessary in order to safely and successfully execute the required tasks. With this respect, besides the kinematic configuration, important aspects to be considered in the design of robotic end‐effectors are the sensorial equipment and proper control strategies. In this paper, an activity for designing and experimenting a gripper for this operation in unstructured environments is reported, and laboratory results are presented and discussed.

There are many instances in automated garment manufacture where static fabric panels have to be picked up and placed onto a moving surface such as a conveyor. The techniques used and, in particular, the effects of lowering a fabric held by its upper edge, onto a moving horizontal surface are described. The particular case of a non‐symmetrical piece is analysed in detail.

It may have just one hand, and much less dexterity than the manual operator, but the typical robot being installed is performing tasks which were not possible to automate just a few years ago. Tedious manual operations are being replaced, with their users experiencing reductions in labour costs, worker injuries and related employer's liability exposure. The new robot is a smart, fast, pick‐and‐place device which frees workers to do other tasks.

As process control needs become ever more stringent, sensors are moving into heavy industry, as Jack Hollingum noted at EMO in Milan.

A non‐contact end‐effector was applied to lift three different materials which have different physical properties. These materials are mica (as rigid material), carton (as semi‐rigid material) and non‐rigid material (woven fabric). This end‐effector operates on the principle of generating a high‐speed air flow between nozzles and the specimen surface thereby creating a vacuum which levitates the materials with no mechanical contact. In this paper, the handling results of these materials are compared with each other. The changes in the physical behavior of lifting materials were observed during the experimental work. The effect of the various air flow rates on the non‐contact handling clearance gap between the nozzle and the materials were also investigated. As a result, it was observed that the non‐contact end‐effector could be applied to handle different flat materials.

Presents a basic idea about a flexible robotic hand for handling fabric pieces in garment manufacture, which is multi‐functional and useful for picking a fabric piece up correctly, transferring and setting it without slipping to any three‐dimensional point. The robotic hand employs a strain gauge sensor and is capable of sensing touch, of measuring the thickness of fabric and its tension. Robotic hands have more applications in computer integrated manufacturing.

FLEXIBILITY has always been associated with robotic systems. However, once a robot has been integrated into an application, the robot is no longer flexible but becomes a part of the tooling. This loss of flexibility is attributed to the use of rigid, costly tooling, which includes end effector tooling.