The Second European Robotics and Intelligent Systems Conference (EURISCON '94) was held in Malaga, Spain, August 1994. The conference featured three concurrent streams, and 30 sessions, each focusing on a specific topic. Two plenary sessions were held for invited lectures, and some joint sessions discussed topics of common interest. In addition, one reception and two informal gatherings were held to provide more interaction among the delegates. Professors Koorosh Khodabandehloo and Spyros Tzafestas were joint chairmen of the conference, which was sponsored by the IEEE, IEE, IMACS, CEC and Universities of Bristol and Malaga.
This special collection of papers not only represents some of the best work from the EURISCON '94 gathering, but also demonstrates the conference's emphasis -a synergistic impact of artificial intelligence on robotics and advanced manufacturing. Several of these papers offer a persuasive look at how highly sophisticated robotics technology can be used to build or enable useful industrial applications. The guest editors also solicited contributions which address some of the basic topics of this journal ( i.e. modelling and simulation) for this special edition.
The selected papers depict a sample of the variety of research efforts of active researchers in the field, and provide a balance between discussion of foundation technology concepts, models and frameworks, and description of integrated applications. Some of the articles are survey and tutorial in part, while others outline the details of particular application endeavours. Academics and practitioners alike have contributed to make this issue interesting and informative in the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice in the robotics field.
Robots are used primarily to relieve workers of hazardous, unhealthy, labour intensive or mindlessly monotonous jobs. For example, because of the hot and hazardous conditions in which welders must work, industry faces a shortage of skilled welders and, by programming a robot to perform welding, the boring and hazardous elements of the job are avoided and the productivity is increased.
In the paper by Lauridsen and his colleagues, the authors detail a model based system for automatic welding of the root-pass in a seam joining a nozzle on a large diameter pipe. The system is based on the use of geometry model of the welding seam and on the inverse welding process models.
Similarly to welding, adhesive dispensing belongs to the class of boring and unhealthy jobs where robots are warmly welcome. Davies and his colleagues describe the application experience of a robotic cell * Corresponding author.