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The purpose of this study is to develop a robotic hand–arm system for on-orbit servicing missions at the Tiangong-2 (TG-2) Space Laboratory.

The hand–arm system is mainly composed of a lightweight arm, a dexterous hand, an electrical cabinet, a global camera, a hand–eye camera and some human–machine interfaces. The 6-DOF lightweight arm and the 15-DOF dexterous hand adopt the modular design philosophy that greatly reduces the design cycle and cost. To reduce the computational burden on the central controller and simplify system maintenance, an electrical system which has a hierarchical structure is introduced.

The prototypical operating experiments completed in TG-2 space laboratory demonstrate the performance of the hand–arm system and lay foundations for the future applications of space manipulators.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows a robotic hand–arm system which can perform on-orbit servicing missions such as grasping the electric drill, screwing the bolt, unscrewing J599 electrical connector has been developed; a variable time step motion plan method is proposed to adjust the trajectories of the lightweight arm to reduce or eliminate the collision force; and a dexterous hand uses the coordinated grasp control based on the object Cartesian stiffness to realize stable grasp. To solve the kinematic mapping from the cyber glove commands to the dexterous hand, a fingertip-position-based method is proposed to acquire precise solutions.

The pulp and paper industry has been the focus of government policies ever since independence. This is the only industry where government plays a multi-dimensional role – not only as the regulator but also as the supplier of raw material and as the buyer. Despite the government's omnipotent role, there is evidence that industry is not very competitive, as it has very high energy and water intensity and poor productivity. A potent factor identified in the literature for the underperformance of the industry or for that matter any economy is the kind of technology used by the firms in the sector. This paper aims to look into the role of government policy in affecting the growth of the industry and what role embodied technology has played in influencing the efficiency of firms in Indian pulp and paper industry.

For the first question, the study uses 66 years of production data of the industry from 1951 to 2016 and tests for the structural break. For the second question, the study uses cross-section plant-level data for the year 2011-2012 of 160 paper manufacturing units to first estimate the stochastic production frontier (stochastic frontier analysis [SFA]) and then uses the output of SFA to find an association between embodied technology gap (TG) and technical efficiency. A methodological problem in earlier literature is the use of the productivity gap as a proxy for embodied TG. The present study uses technical parameters of papermaking – machine deckle and operating speed – to construct an index of TG.

The results show a structural break in the production trend occurring in 1999 with the delicensing in July 1997 as the possible cause. The SFA results show that the average technical inefficiency (TE) of the firms in the sector is 74 per cent with half of the firms having TE higher than 76 per cent. The study, however, does not find any impact of embodied TG on technical efficiency; rather it is the age, size, ownership and location that have an impact on it.

This is an original research, as the author has not come across any study in Indian context or elsewhere using technical parameters to construct TG variable.