Editorial note: Robotics and industrial automation technology

Abstract

There is no doubt that robotics and industrial automation technology is evolving quiet fast. However, the end user expectation of the technology realisation is still far from what expected. This is due to the limited development of intelligence, typical human brain cells, 3-Dimensional (3D) visual, audible and dynamic movement systems that have the same abilities and self-learning as human, to help in decision making in various environment. There are number of applied research programmes underdevelopment around the world that addresses some of these aforementioned developments. Vision is one of the most important sense and the future robot/autonomous systems proficiency will significantly depend on the ability to see, recognise, distinguish objects and estimate distances. Most jobs depend on the talent of visual perception and it must acknowledge that today's manufacture technologies and applications more and more often broaden well beyond the limits of human visual capacities. This is where robot and autonomous machine vision technology comes in. It is one of the constantly growing areas of applied research that dealing with processing and analysing of visual digital data capture. It plays a key role in the development of intellectual systems and empowers decision making for some of the future robot, autonomous systems, industrial process and manufacturing.