Robots for In Situ Interventions [From the Guest Editors]

Conventionally, manufacturers of robotic systems have focused their technological developments on responding to the automation of production lines for new products and/or repetitive tasks. As a result, there is now a large family of industrial robotics with generally similar configurations [serial arrangements of five or six degrees of freedom (DoF)]. However, because these have been developed mainly for open spaces (i.e., large workshops), their capability to access confined environments is rather limited from the points of view of both the workspace and number of DoFs.