We address the potential for continuous “continuum” robot elements to transform the nature of robotic traversal of uneven terrain. Continuum robots are “dual” to traditional robot structures, with their inherent capabilities featuring strengths in areas that are key weaknesses for conventional robots. These capabilities match well to current challenges in robot mobility, particularly in unstruc...

Swedish wheeled mobile robots have remarkable mobility properties allowing them to rotate and translate at the same time. Being holonomic systems, their kinematics model results in the possibility of designing separate and independent position and heading trajectory tracking control laws. Nevertheless, if these control laws should be implemented in the presence of unaccounted actuator saturatio...

Mobile robot navigation has remained an open problem over the last two decades. Mobile robots are required to navigate in unknown and dynamic environments, and in recent years the use of mobile robots in material handling has considerably increased. Usually workers push carts around warehouses and manually handle orders which is not very cost‐effective. To this e...

Mobile manipulators have been given extensive attention in recent years since they have many applications such as materials transport and service for disabled persons. A mobile modular manipulator is normally composed of an m-wheeled mobile platform and an n-degree-of-freedom (DOF) onboard modular manipulator. This combination extends the workspace of the entire robot dramatically. Building up ...

Mobile and/or autonomous robots represent a widely approached research subject. The most common problems associated to all the types of mobile robots refers to the spatial orientation system and to the mathematical models. Additionally, many difficulties are generated taking into consideration practical aspects of implementation, but the technology evolution made possible to develop smaller siz...

The area of collective and cooperative behaviour in swarm robots is an exciting field of study. Recent technological and economic developments have made it possible to build medium to large scale swarms of quite sophisticated mobile robots. We review recent mobile computing technologies and describe our architecture for a swarm of tri-wheeled robots that can exchange information via wireless ar...