The purpose of this paper is to extract informations of personal perception of speech based on the human sense of the voice quality. First, auditory experiments for similarity judgments of speakers and preference judgments of voice are performed by the method of paired comparisons. Thirteen [e] vowels are used as the speech samples. Next, five experiments for similarity judgments of voices are executed by using five commonly terms that describe the voice quality. Furthermore, acoustic parameters of speech are extracted by improved homomorphic prediction (IHPA).
As the results of analyses based on the correlational method and the multidimentional scaling technique, the following properties became clear. (1) Specific senses of the voice quality contribute to the perceptual judgments of the similarity of speakers and the preference of voices. (2) These informations of the voice quality are chiefly characterized by pitch frequency and higher-formant frequency.

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Using a graphical display, the effect of two-dimensional figure is considered on control performance of a human operator controlling a plant with a large time constant; adoped figures are a dot, a dot with a past trajectory, a rectilinear figure, and some figures like a ship. The results are summarized as follows. (1) A rectilinear figure resulted the best performance index in all figures. (2) Considerable increase of a performance index was achieved by adding a trajectory to a dot. (3) The gain for the rectilinear figure was higher than those for the other figures, while its phase lag was smaller.

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The concern of this paper is an application of system reliability to man-robot system. Human reliability is treated as a part of man-robot system reliability, and a model is made by using Swain's Dependence Model, Yukimachi's theory, and FTA.
Data from experiments and from a company which uses ten robots are applied to the model and good fitness is obtained for empirical data of system failure as a top event. Finally, by using the model, cost-effectiveness is discussed for several man-robot system safety policies.

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