This is the 2nd special issue on education of robotics & mechatronics on Journal Robotics & Mechatronics. Six years have passed since the previous issue (Vol.23, No.5) was published. This special issue includes nine research papers and two review papers, among which four research papers focus on the utilization of robots in STEM education, which has been spotlighted recently, and programming education for the young. Five research papers propose educational methods with novel, unprecedented ideas, and the two review papers overview technology education in Japan. The review papers focus on STEM education that utilizes a variety of manufacturing methods that have become familiar, and they present a variety of efforts being made in STEM education, programming education in today’s Japan.

At present, Germany’s Industry 4.0, Japan’s Robot Strategy, and many other initiatives are being undertaken in the world to promote development technology as it relates to production automation and efficiency. The development of human resources that are capable of working with these new technologies has also gathered public attention, with each educational institution now required to enrich its STEM education. As part of this movement, in 2020, programming education will be added to Japan’s elementary school curriculum, with robots being the focus of the education. This situation indicates that the importance of educational robotics is likely to continue to increase in the future. We expect that this special issue will contribute to the development of educational robotics communities and of human resources that are well prepared in the field of robotics.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all contributors and the reviewers for making this special issue possible.

This paper describes the development of a communication robot for STEM education, in which digital fabrication equipment such as a 3D printer and laser cutter are used. Specifically, although STEM education programs are active in several countries outside of Japan, they are not yet officially adopted in the curricula for Japanese elementary and junior high schools; however, a few undertakings exist outside schools. Meanwhile, the new curriculum guidelines announced in March 2017 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) recognize the need for cross-subject activities and require elementary schools to introduce education on programmatic thinking. This suggests that STEM education-related activities will be introduced in Japanese school education in the near future and that educational programs that utilize robots will become increasingly active. Furthermore, the availability of technologies, such as speech recognition, artificial intelligence, and IoT, makes it highly likely that communication robots will be adopted in a variety of school situations. This study reviews the author’s development of a communication robot based on the use of digital fabrication technology within the context of STEM education; teaching plans are proposed, premised on the use of the STEM robot within the framework of the new curriculum guidelines that will be adopted by elementary and junior high schools in Japan from FY2020.

If we look at an overview of technology education in the world, we realize that technology education in professional education, as well as in ordinary education, plays an important role in supporting the idea of a technology-intensive Japan. This study focused on the trend of technology education in compulsory education in Japan. Compared to technology education in advanced countries, fewer class hours are spent on technology education in compulsory education in Japan. However, various attempts have been made with robots and programming, mostly under the subject “technology and home economics,” at junior high schools. In particular, the future development of programming education implementation can be expected. At the same time, schools face multiple problems, including class hours and a lack of full-time teachers. These problems must be solved to enhance technology education.

To apply science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education effectively, it is necessary to prepare a core that would combine its four elements and to place it centrally in an educational activity. The present authors have previously conducted an educational activity, the core of which comprised model construction using free-body diagrams (FBDs); this activity was targeted at a small group of learners. The authors employed underwater robots as the instructional material, and confirmed that positive learning effects can be produced. In the present study, we used a block diagram to construct a model of educational activities to educate participants by introducing an underwater robot and FBDs to a large group of learners, simultaneously. In addition, we designed an educational program, which ensured that the configuration would remain potent when expanded to large groups, aiming toward ensuring the educational effects. We hosted a contest based on this configuration, then evaluated the results qualitatively – by observing the participating students – and quantitatively – by conducting a questionnaire survey – to verify the effects. As a result, it was confirmed that consistency can be obtained even if the conventional educational method is extended to a larger number of student.

In Hiroshima Prefecture, an inter-university collaborative educational project of an interdisciplinary field: Clinical Informatics and Technology (the CIT program) has being implemented. As a part of the CIT program, we have been working on CISTEM (Clinical Information, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) education to establish a systematic educational curriculum for students (mainly undergraduate students) who will be responsible for medical engineering cooperation/collaboration in the future. In this paper, from the viewpoints of communication and control engineering, we introduce an attempt to enhance students’ problem consciousness and motivation for research and development by facilitating their self-discovery of the design principles commonly required for medical instruments and medical systems through production tasks utilizing robotic platforms. Especially we introduce our case studies focusing on the significance of human-human synchrony and human-machine synchrony towards the realization of symbiosis among humans and machines. We further propose a model case of an CISTEM education customized for undergraduate students who specialize in information, communication and control engineering based on trials conducted in these case studies.

A robot that consists of a compact disc (CD) and an embedded microcomputer has been developed as a robotics learning tool for elementary and junior high school students. The students can program the robot to draw a variety of shapes by placing a pen in the center hole of the CD. As the movement track of the robot can be recorded, the students can preserve their devised program execution results. In addition, intuitive instructions can be used to control the robot. This allows to input the program by operating several push-button switches. The program instructions can be viewed on the robot’s 8 LEDs-display interface. This robot is a unique teaching tool, which can be used to learn the mechanism of the robot composed of sensors, actuators, and a computer, without using a personal computer.

Japan’s national education policy puts importance on children learning to program. In fact, course guidelines published by the government in 2008 made the programming of the measurement and control compulsory in junior high schools, and learning programming will be made compulsory in elementary schools in 2020. This research studies robotics classes for elementary and junior high school students. The tasks set for the robots used in each class are familiar to children, and they were set with the aim of inspiring a proactive learning attitude in the children. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of robots in teaching programming to children.

This paper describes a framework for “Robo-iku” (education facilitated by robots) at the kindergarten and primary school levels. We believe the concept of Robo-iku can help to give a unified approach to the problem of the avoidance of science and technology learning. It can also provide young children with opportunities to develop various skills, such as cooperative skills and/or skills to help them relate well to others. We detail the practical experience of a “monotsukuri” workshop for primary school children, a workshop on designing and building rescue robots. A working definition of “Robo-iku” is provided. The results of the workshop imply that the concept of Robo-iku needs to be further investigated.

This study develops teaching materials for mechatronics in higher education. Industrial societies require numerous mechatronics engineers, and most technical universities provide mechatronics exercises in their curriculums. However, it is difficult for teachers and students to modify and improve the mechatronic teaching materials because the provided materials are finished products. Therefore, a simple and inexpensive educational system is developed to overcome the disadvantages of the finished products. In this paper, an experimental apparatus is proposed for mechatronics education, and a practical example is presented that involves learning control methods, sensors, actuators, and mechanics.

Teaching materials that can interactively display the vectors of forces and velocities as well as the trajectories and graphs of remarkable points, which are invisible in actual mechanical movements, should be capable of effectively supporting the learning of complex robot mechanics. In this study, we aim to acquire knowledge about the design principles for building teaching materials for robot mechanics, applying projection mapping technology (PM). We have first studied the components required in teaching material systems on the following candidate mechanisms: transmission mechanism with spur gears and quadric crank chain as two basic mechanisms and serial two-link mechanism as a representative subject of robot mechanisms. We have constructed systems and conducted experiments to evaluate their performance. In this study, we propose a fundamental method for designing teaching materials on mechanisms applying PM, establish the effectiveness of the proposed method, and indicate problems with the current systems.

The purpose of our education approach is the giving the knowledge and the experience for the research activity to the freshman student who assigned the Lab. We think that “the interaction between the robot and the real world information which is observed by sensor” is important for the student education for student’s research in the Lab. Here, the interaction means how perform the robot based on the real world information which is observed by sensors. The development of the mobile robot which work in Robot competition (Tsukuba Challenge) requires “the interaction between the mobile robot and real world.” For this reason, we think that this activity (participating in the Tsukuba Challenge anf development of the mobile robot) is effective for the student education, and we educate the student by utilizing the development of the mobile robot for Tsukuba Challenge. Although our approach performed in short span, we achieve the good result. For example, the students achieves the research outcome by utilizing the learned skill, and submitted the paper to the academic conference. We verified that our education approach is effective for improvement the student education and motivation.

We report a practical case example of robot manufacturing practice using a Project Based Learning method, a type of active learning educational method, conducted in the 2015 and 2016 school years. The practice is a compulsory class for fourth-year students in the mechatronics course of a technical college. We study the influence of the class on planning ability, designing ability, and manufacturing ability as engineers, and basic ability as members of society. In addition, we analyze the process of the practice, state of students, and results of a questionnaire survey to show the effectiveness of the practice as a means of practical career education.

This paper attempts to develop a novel prosthetic control system based on an Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. The proposed method is able to employ not only information from muscle activities of the user and status of a prosthetic hand but also a wide range of data obtained from objects and items in the environment. The sensor data can be static features, dynamic statuses, and even contextual information of the operation. Fusion of these sensor data composes a rich information foundation to support multi-DoF and dexterous prosthetic hands. It is expected that much more reliable reasoning and more autonomous control decision can be developed using an IoT-based control system. The proposed method is verified with a case study using objects with simple sensor units and a Myo armband for electromyographic (EMG) signals.

We developed a restroom danger detection system (RDDS) for detecting dangerous situations and protecting the elderly. Restrooms are particularly dangerous places for elderly persons. Our RDDS detects danger in real time by using image processing and sends an alert to a family member, hospital staff, etc. It comprises four processes: person detection, center of gravity detection, ellipse detection, and danger decision. The human detection process calculates the difference between an image of the empty restroom and one of the restroom when it is occupied (to which a brightness correction has been applied). The difference image is binarized and used for detecting the presence of a person. If a person is detected, the person’s center of gravity and ellipse are detected in the binarized image after it is denoised. The obtained information is used for detecting a dangerous situation. If the dangerous situation continues for 60 seconds, an alert is sent. Testing showed that our system can detect a dangerous situation within 1.5 seconds. This RDDS is one step toward the development of a comprehensive elderly person protection system.

In this paper, an operator-based robust perfect control for nonlinear semiconductor refrigeration device with uncertainties and perturbation is considered. For the research about the properties of the semiconductor refrigeration, an aluminum plate with Peltier device is very representative. Therefore, the perfect tracking control performance of semiconductor refrigeration can be investigated by using this aluminum plate with Peltier device. Moreover, the operator based robust right coprime factorization (RRCF) approach is convenient in analysis and designing control system of nonlinear plant with uncertainties and perturbation. Based on the above reasons, an operator-based robust tracking control design for nonlinear semiconductor refrigeration device with uncertainties and perturbation is investigated by using an operator-based robust right coprime factorization approach, where the operator-based disturbance and state observers based on nominal plant properties are designed to compensate the effect of uncertainties and perturbation. A realizable operator controller is designed to improve the control performance and to realize the perfect tracking. The sufficient condition of robust stability for the designed system is derived. The robust stability condition ensured that the output tracking performance is realized. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed design scheme was illustrated by the simulation and experimental results.

With the development of modern technology, actuators and sensors composed of smart materials, such as piezoceramic and magnetostrictive materials, have been widely used in practice owing to their various advantages. However, in the working process of a smart material based actuator and sensor, non-smooth nonlinear constraints in their output responses may induce inaccuracies and oscillations, which severely degrade system performance. Therefore, input and output nonlinear constraints brought about by actuators and sensors should be considered. Generally, the output nonlinear constraint, namely, non-smooth effects from sensors, has been ignored. Therefore, in this paper, a robust control for a system with an output constraint as well as with both input and output constraints will be considered. Firstly, the generalized Prandtl-Ishlinskii (PI) hysteresis model is used for describing the input and output nonlinearities owing to its excellent characteristics, the model has proved suitable in theoretical operator based settings. Further, a robust control for a nonlinear system with an output nonlinear constraint is considered by using operator based robust right coprime factorization approach. Here, operator based robust stability is considered, and the control system structure including feedforward and feedback controllers is presented with a derivation of sufficient conditions for stable controller operation. Based on the proposed conditions, the influence from an output nonlinear constraint is rejected, the systems are robustly stable, and output tracking performance can be realized. Moreover, robust stability and output tracking performance for a nonlinear system with both input and output nonlinear constraints are also analyzed.