A meal supporting system for handicapped people who cannot eat food by themselves has been developed in our laboratory. In the 1st report of this study, it has succeeded to develop an improved system which has four concepts; “safety”, “reliability”, “comfortable” and “sense of eating by themselves”. However, user-interface of the system was not useful for handicapped person. The length of elapsed time of operation and the difficulty of operation method caused a stress for user. Therefore, the user-interface which has easy operation method by image recognizing system was developed in our laboratory. Because of image recognizing system, the elapsed time to operate meal supporting system decreased by 60%, and the difficulty level decreased to about its half. The meal supporting system with image recognizing interface was evaluated by the satisfaction level using test subject. By this study, the meal supporting system which can provide user an easy and intuitive operation was developed.

For an air-cooled engine, designers must choose the number of fins required for cooling, then arrange them along the cylinder at a suitable fin pitch. Most motorbikes mount their air-cooled engines at a slant, with their cylinder central axis not perpendicular to the air flow. This study investigated the cooling characteristics of air-cooled experimental cylinders, with various fin pitches and number of fins, mounted at tilt angles between 0°(vertical) and 90°(horizontal),in a wind tunnel at air velocities of 20km/h (5.6m/s) and 60km/h (16.7m/s). Heat release from the cylinder was measured, air flow between fins was observed using the smoke wire method, and air flow over fin surfaces was observed using the oil film method. Results indicated that, except at 20km/h (5.6m/s) and a pitch of 7.5mm, cylinder cooling increased as tilt angle increased from 0° to 40°, then decreased when the cylinder tilt angle exceeded 40°. Only at 20km/h (5.6m/s) and a pitch of 7.5mm, cylinder cooling increased as tilt angle increased from 0° to 30°, then decreased when the cylinder tilt angle exceeded 30°. Cylinder cooling was maximized with 7 fins pitched at 10mm.

To evaluate the slip resistances between floors and shoes, we developed a cart-type friction measurement device to measure both the static and dynamic coefficients of friction (SCOF and DCOF, respectively). The device was designed considering factors such as portability, normal load and sliding velocity conditions comparable to those in actual walking scenarios, measurement of both the SCOF and DCOF simultaneously, and measurement with variation in the sliding velocity. The device, pushed by the experimenter, dragged shoes across the floor, and the traction force was measured using a load cell. The three-axis acceleration acting on the footwear was measured with an accelerometer. The traction force measured using the load cell was corrected by the inertia force on the shoes because variations in the sliding velocity of the footwear were unavoidable. The COF from the load cell, with correction for the acceleration and slope angle, was close to that from the force plate. This result validates the COF measurement method using the cart-type friction measurement device. Thereafter, the friction measurement device was used to evaluate the slip resistances between commercial available floor sheets and shoes with flat outsoles and safety shoes. For shoes with a flat outsole, two floors showed low slip resistances, and one showed high slip resistance. For safety shoes, all the floors showed low slip resistances.

The PBL (Problem Based Learning) style educational training project was executed successfully. This project was carried out as a competition between seven teams of the seven different National Institutes of Technology of the Tokai-Hokuriku region. Each team consisted of three students, who addressed some high-level engineering design problems, i.e. the construction of a very sophisticated pick & place control system by using a 3-axis stage for almost three months. The pick & place control system is composed of high-technology control devices; they are a new type of PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) named SysmacNJ, AC-servo, smart camera, and inverter, manufactured by Omron Corporation. All of these devices have a high functional sufficiency to cope with the challenging problems. On the last day of this project a contest was held to show the efforts of all students. The seven teams got together and competed in the accuracy and the speed of their pick & place control system in the contest. All of the students got sufficient skill and learned about the importance of the manufacturing technology, teamwork, and time management from this training project.