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The purpose of this paper is to design a climbing robot connected by a connecting rod mechanism to achieve multi-functional tasks such as obstacles crossing and climbing of power transmission towers.

A connecting rod type gripper has been designed to achieve stable grasping of angle steel. Before grasping, use coordination between structures to achieve stable docking and grasping. By using the alternating movements of two claws and the middle climbing mechanism, the climbing and obstacle crossing of the angle steel were achieved.

Through a simple linkage mechanism, a climbing robot has been designed, greatly reducing the overall mass of the robot. It can also carry a load of 1 kg, and the climbing mechanism can perform stable climbing. The maximum step distance of the climbing robot is 543 mm, which can achieve the crossing of angle steel obstacles.

A transmission tower climbing mechanism was proposed by analyzing the working environment. Through the locking ability of the screw nut, stable clamping of the angle steel is achieved, and a pitch mechanism is designed to adjust the posture of the hand claw.

Aims to report on the various types of tele‐operated mobile service robots for remote inspection and maintenance, especially in the field of nuclear industry.

Describes nuclear electric robot operator (NERO), Sizewell A duct inspection equipment (SADIE), Robug‐IIs (all leg‐based) and Roboslave (wheel‐based).

That these robots can handle a significant portion of inspection and maintenance tasks in a typical nuclear plant, though, given that they are primarily tailor‐made, they are still too expensive for ordinary industries.

As the interests of health and safety and paramount, this study sees the use of such robots expanding and diversifying, irrespective of cost.

The purpose of this paper is to gain an in-depth understanding into the research progress, hot spots and future trends in smart gripping technology in the field of apparel smart manufacturing.

This work scrutinised the current research status of the five automatic grasping methods for garment fabrics including the pneumatic suction grasping, the electrostatic grasping, the intrusive grasping and the dexterous grasping. Specifically, the principles, characteristics, main devices and the impact on garment production were discussed.

In particular, soft finger of the dexterous grasping method has good flexibility and adaptability in the process of fabric grasping, which provides a new solution for garment production automation. Up to now, the reviewed method in general exhibit good grasping speed, high grasping stability and flat grasping process. However, in the face of complex fabric materials which are thin and flexible and do not return their original shapes when deformed in practical applications, the gripper for automatic fabric grasping need new technological breakthroughs in the positioning accuracy, grab efficiency and flexible grasping.

The outcomes offered an overview of the research status and future trends of the automatic grasping methods for garment fabrics in the field of apparel intelligent manufacturing. It could not only provide scholars with convenience in identifying research hot spots and building potential cooperation in the follow-up research but also assist beginners in searching core scholars and literature of great significance.

Soft grippers have safer and more adaptable human–machine and environment–machine interactions than rigid grippers. However, most soft grippers with single gripping postures have a limited gripping range. Therefore, this paper aims to design a soft gripper with variable gripping posture to enhance the gripping adaptability.

This paper proposes a novel soft gripper consisting of a conversion mechanism and four spring-reinforced soft pneumatic actuators (SSPAs) as soft fingers. By adjusting the conversion mechanism, four gripping postures can be achieved to grip objects of different shapes, sizes and weights. Furthermore, a quasi-static model is established to predict the bending deformation of the finger. Finally, the bending angle of the finger is measured to validate the accuracy of the quasi-static model. The gripping force and gripping adaptability are tested to explore the gripping performance of the gripper.

Through experiments, the results have shown that the quasi-static model can accurately predict the deformation of the finger; the gripper has the most significant gripping force under the parallel posture, and the gripping adaptability of the gripper is highly enhanced by converting the four gripping postures.

By increasing the gripping posture, a novel soft gripper with enhanced gripping adaptability is proposed to enlarge the gripping range of the soft gripper with a single posture. Furthermore, a quasi-static model is established to analyze the deformation of SSPA.

The purpose of this paper is to design a microgripper that can achieve nondestructive gripping of a miniaturized ultra-thin-walled cylindrical part.

The microgripper is mainly made of an inflatable silica gel gasbag, which can minimize the damage to the part in the gripping process. This paper introduces the design principle of a flexible air-filled microgripper, which is applied in an in-house microassembly system with coaxial alignment function. Its parameters and performance specifications have been obtained by simulation, experiment demarcating. The results show that the microgripper is able to grasp an ultra-thin-walled part non-destructively.

For the microgripper, finite element simulations and experiments were carried out, and both results indicate that the microgripper can achieve nondestructive gripping of a miniaturized ultra-thin-walled cylindrical part, with good stability, great grasping force and high repeat positioning accuracy.

Gripping the ultra-thin-walled part may lead to deformation and destruction easily. It has been a big bottleneck hindering successful assembly. This article introduces a novel microgripper using an inflatable sac. The work is interesting from an industrial point of view for a specific category of assembly applications. It provides a theoretical guidance and technical support to design a microgripper for a miniaturized ultra-thin-walled part of different sizes.

This paper aims to present a review of the NPE 2006, Plastics Show held in Chicago, IL with emphasis on robots, their application in the plastics industry and end‐of‐arm‐tooling.

In‐depth interviews with suppliers of robots, injection molding machines, system integration of robots into plastic processing applications, control suppliers and end‐of‐arm‐tooling.

The plastic injection molding industry is moving to production cells with heavy usage of robot machine tending. The need for very short cycle times drives the interest in very fast agile robots with the ability to integrate easily into the production cell approach. New technologies such as in mold labeling also drive the need for suitable robots and competent system integrators to supply successful systems.

Robot builders need to continue to develop specialized robots and tooling to match with advancements in applications in the plastic industry. Users will need to think of robots as a necessary adjunct to any injection molding application.

Presents a review of the NPE 2006, Plastics Show, Chicago, IL, with emphasis on robots, their application in the plastics industry and end‐of‐arm‐tooling.

THE study of the flight of birds has provided and will still provide much valuable information for tiie progress of human flight. Many suggestions for the improvements of wings by the use of special wing tips owe their existence to the observation of nature. In spite of such suggestions, free‐flight experimentation—as far as published work goes—is still rather rare and restricted in scope. This reluctance may be due to practical design considerations (handling) as well as to the necessity of making the conventional aileron as efficient as possible; it may also be caused by the impression that experiment in this direction is not worth the effort.

THE Metrication Board, with Lord Ritchie‐Calder as chairman, began its existence on the first of this month. Its function is persuasive rather than mandatory, since there is no intention of any Whitehall plan being imposed on us. It is a voluntary movement which can rely upon Government support in areas which investigation has shown to be in need of it.

In spite of the rapid growth in both the scope and diversity of information available today, the development of information services has not been the same everywhere. A large factor in development, or under‐development, of information services in any given country is a function of society’s perception of the importance of such services in its decision‐making process. Iran has been treated as a case study. Regardless of its cultural diversity, Iran has still to get to grips with the question of freedom of information. The pace of social and technological development has caught many statesmen unprepared. Past studies had indicated that, in Iran, only those information services that had adopted a result‐oriented approach to management, and had vigorous user‐education programmes, are successful. The growth of Iranian information services took place following the end of the war, with the influx of research and combat engineers in both the private and government sectors.

The winner of the 1971 Cominco Galvanising Design scheme was a demountable car park designed for B.O.A.C. at Heathrow. This article considers the complete design, especially the unusual use of steel fibre reinforcement in the small concrete decking slabs.