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This paper aims to extend the literature on how to harness the expertise of team members. This paper suggests that the leader’s expertise recognition plays an important role in enhancing team effectiveness. In addition, leader’s personal dispositions shape how the leader’s recognition could benefit team expertise utilization.

This paper utilizes a two-wave, multi-source (team leaders and team members rated) survey design from 78 information technology teams to test the proposed moderated mediation model.

The data analysis revealed that a leader’s expertise recognition is positively related to team expertise utilization. Moreover, the leaders’ traits (i.e. social dominance and reflectiveness) act as important boundary conditions of this relationship. Specifically, only when the leader is less socially dominant or more reflective can they fully utilize the expertise recognition and enhance team creativity through team expertise utilization.

This study investigated an important issue that expertise utilization research has hitherto overlooked: the effects of leader’s expertise recognition on team expertise utilization and team creativity.

The rope-climbing robot that can cling to a rope for locomotion has been a popular piece of equipment for some overhead applications due to its high flexibility. In view of problems left by existing rope-climbing robots, this paper aims to propose a new-style rope-climbing robot named Finger-wheeled mechanism robot (FWMR)-II to improve their performance.

FWMR-II adopts a modular and link-type mechanical structure. With the finger-wheeled mechanism (FWM) module, the robot can achieve smooth and quick locomotion and good capability of obstacle-crossing on the rope and with the link module based on a spatial parallel mechanism, the robot adaptability for rope environments is improved further. The kinematic models that can present configurations of the FWM module and link module of the robot are established and for typical states of the obstacle-crossing process, the geometric definitions and constraints that can present the robot position relative to the rope are established. The simulation is performed with the optimization calculating method to obtain the robot adaptability for rope environments and the experiment is also conducted with the developed prototype to verify the robot performance.

From the simulation results, the adaptability for rope environments of FWMR-II are obtained and the advantage of FWMR-II compared with FWMR-I is also proved. The experiment results give a further verification for the robot design and analysis work.

The robot proposed in this study can be used for inspection of power transmission lines, inspection and delivery in mine and some other overhead applications.

An ingenious modular link-type robot is proposed to improve existing rope-climbing robots and the method established in this study is worthy of reference for obstacle-crossing analysis of other rope-climbing robots.

The mechanical properties between wheel and ground will affect the motion performance of wheeled omnidirectional mobile robot (OMR). MY3 wheel is an omnidirectional wheel. This paper aims to analyze the contact mechanical characteristics between MY3 wheel and ground to improve the motion accuracy of an omnidirectional mobile platform with MY3 wheel (MY3-OMR).

This method takes MY3 wheel as the research objective. The normal and tangential contact mechanics model and rolling contact mechanics model of MY3 wheel are established by analyzing the structure of MY3 wheel, and thereby, the slip ratio of MY3 wheel in the process of motion is calculated. The kinematics model of MY3-OMR is optimized by taking the slip ratio as the optimization parameter that aims to improve motion accuracy of MY3-OMR.

The correctness of the mechanical analysis and the feasibility of the method are verified by the MY3-OMR prototype. Let MY3-OMR move along the set circular trajectory and square trajectory, and the error between the motion trajectory before and after optimization and the standard trajectory is obtained. It illustrates that the error in the square trajectory is reduced by 1.5%, and the circular trajectory error is reduced by 2%; therefore, the method is effective.

A method based on contact mechanics is proposed and verified. Through the establishment of wheel-ground contact mechanics model to optimize MY3-OMR kinematics model, and thereby, the motion accuracy of MY3-OMR is improved, which lays a foundation for MY3-OMR engineering application.

Omnidirectional mobile robots with a special type of wheel structure can realize flexible motion with all three degrees of freedom in a plane. But the driving method brings large disturbance, which affects motion accuracy and stability. This study aims to improve the motion control accuracy of the omnidirectional mobile platform with MY3 wheels (MY3-OMR), a new fuzzy active disturbance rejection control (FADRC) method with adaptivity is proposed.

Based on the basic mechanical structure and drive characteristics of MY3-OMR, the dynamics model of the system is established. The linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) system is designed to reduce the interference of nonlinear factors in this dynamics model. A fuzzy controller is introduced to realize the online adjustment of the parameters of the LADRC, which further improves the anti-disturbance performance of the system.

The control method proposed in this paper is compared and analyzed with other methods by simulation and experiment. Results show that the proposed method has better tracking and robustness, which effectively improves the control accuracy of trajectory tracking of MY3-OMR.

A FADRC method with adaptivity is proposed by combining fuzzy control and LADRC. The motion accuracy and anti-interference ability of the MY3-OMR are improved by this control method, which lays a foundation for the subsequent application of MY3-OMR.

With the development of automation technology, the accuracy, bearing capacity and self-adaptation requirements of wheeled mobile robots are more and more demanding under various complex conditions, which will urge designers such shortcomings as the low accuracy, poor flexibility and weak obstacle crossing ability of traditional heavy haul vehicles and improve the wear resistance and bearing capacity of traditional omnidirectional wheels.

The optimal configuration for heavy payload transportation is obtained by building sliding friction consumption model of traditional wheels with different driving types based on Hertz tangential contact theory. The heavy payload omnidirectional wheel with a double-wheel steering and a coupled differential wheel driving is designed with the optimal configuration. The wheel consists of a differential gear train unit and a nonindependent suspension unit. Kinematics model of the wheel is established and relative parameters are optimized.

The prototype experiments show that the wheel has higher motion accuracy and environment adaptability. The results are consistent with the theoretical calculation, which show that the accuracy is more than 50% higher than that of differential prototype. The motion stability and the accuracy of the coupled differential omnidirectional wheel are better than those of the traditional omnidirectional wheels during the moving and obstacle crossing process under complex conditions, which verifies the correctness and advantages of the design.

Aiming at the specific application of heavy payload omnidirectional transportation, a new omnidirectional mobile mechanism with a two-wheel coupling drive structure and an adaptive mechanism is proposed. The simulation and experimental results show that it can realize the high-precision heavy-load omnidirectional movement, the effective contact with the ground and improve the adaptability to the rugged ground. It is flexible, simple and modular and can be widely applied to transportation, exploration, detection and other related industrial fields.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a multipurpose inspection robot that can both walk on the ground and climb on poles. The structure design, size optimization, kinematics analysis, experiment and arithmetic of the robot are discussed in the paper.

The robot consists of three adjustable modules and a two-degree-of-freedom parallel mechanism in tandem, and the wheel-finger mechanism of each module can realize wheel-finger opening and closing for fast movement and obstacle crossing. This paper uses geometric analysis and simulation analysis to derive size optimization, and vector coordinate method to derive kinematics. Finally, the experiment is carried out by simulating the working environment of the robot.

The robot can realize ground walking and ground turning through the robot entity prototype experiment on the built working environment and efficiently realize 0°–90° pole climbing by the assemble design, optimization and machining. In addition, the robot can also smoothly complete the state transition process from 0° ground to 90° pole climbing. Furthermore, the robot shows good environmental self-adaptation and can complete daily inspection work.

The robot can pitch and yaw at a large angle and has six-legged characteristics. It is a multipurpose inspection robot that can walk on the ground and climb on poles. And through structure design, size optimization, kinematics analysis and simulation, the existing robots’ common shortcomings such as poor barrier-crossing ability and poor environmental adaptability are solved.