宇宙時代におけるロボティックスの役割　人間生理・心理との関係

抄録

Even though the market size is still small at this moment, applied fields of robots are gradually spreading from the manufacturing industry to the others in recent years. One can now easily expect that applications of robots will expand into the first and the third industrial fields as one of the important components to support our society in the 21st century. There also raises strong anticipations in Japan that robots for the personal use will coexist with humans and provide supports such as the assistance for the housework, care of the aged and the physically handicapped, since Japan is one the fastest aging societies in the world. Consequently, humanoid robots and/or animaloid robots have been treated as subjects of robotics researches in Japan such as a research tool for human/animal science, an entertainment/mental-commit robot or an assistant/agent for humans in the human living environment. Over the last couple of years, some manufactures including famous global companies started to develop prototypes or even to sell mass production robots for the purposes mentioned above, such as SONY, TMSUK, ZMP, TOYOTA, HONDA, Mitsubishi Heavy, etc. Most of those robots have some lifelikeness in their appearances and behaviors. On the other hand, Waseda University, where we belong to, has been one of the leading research sites on humanoid robot research since the late Prof. Ichiro Kato and his colleagues started the WABOT (WAseda roBOT) Projects and developed the historical humanoid robots that are WABOT-1 and WABOT-2 done in the early 70s and 80s respectively. One of the most important aspects of our research philosophy is as follows: By constructing anthropomorphic/humanoid robots that function and behave like a human, we are attempting to develop a design method of a humanoid robot having human friendliness to coexist with humans naturally and symbiotically, as well as to scientifically build not only the physical model of a human but also the mental model of it from the engineering view point. Based upon the philosophy mentioned above, we have been doing researches on humanoid robots, such as the Biped Walking Robots, Emotion Expression Robots, Mastication Robots, Flute Player Robots, Speech Production Robots, etc. We believe that our research philosophy and methodology on humanoid robot design will be applicable to space robot design and also will give important knowledge and views to space sciences.