Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) forms the core of the technology that supports mobile robots. With SLAM, when a robot is moving in an actual environment, real world information is imported to a computer on the robot via a sensor, and robot’s physical location and a map of its surrounding environment of the robot are created. SLAM is a major topic in mobile robot research. Although the information, supported by a mathematical description, is derived from a space in reality, it is formulated based on a probability theory when being handled. Therefore, this concept contributes not only to the research and development concerning mobile robots, but also to the training of mathematics and computer implementation, aimed mainly at position estimation and map creation for the mobile robots. This article focuses on the SLAM technology, including a brief overview of its history, insights from the author, and, finally, introduction of a specific example that the author was involved.

Control engineering and sensing engineering improve productivity and save resources and energy in industry, and they are also deeply related to the solving greater societal, economic, and environmental problems. Control engineering and sensing engineering have become dynamic forces that enrich various phases of life through interdisciplinary or cross-sectional study. Furthermore, in recent years, due to the development of information technology, as symbolized by terms such as “big data” or “AI,” “sensing and control at a higher level” has become possible, premised by big data processing that is faster by orders of magnitude than conventional data processing. All this has increased the importance of control engineering and sensing engineering.

In response to the development of the fields of control engineering and sensing engineering associated with the advance of the “information society,” education in these fields has also needed to be enhanced. On the national scale, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology will introduce Japanese elementary school computational thinking education into elementary school in fiscal year 2020, and the new Courses of Study for High School Information Education in fiscal year 2022. At the same time, individual companies, educational institutions, etc. have also been experimenting with various forms of education in control engineering and sensing engineering. During these changing times, the most advanced studies related to the development of instruction and evaluation methods for educational materials on control engineering, sensing engineering, and control technology have been collected, and the present special issue was planned.

This special issue is a collection of practical papers related to measurement and control education, including one paper on Model-Based Development education in a company and eight papers on education in an educational institution. These eight papers include two on education using a robot contest in a university, one on introducing measurement and control engineering education in a national institute of technology college, three on introducing it in a junior high school, and two on introducing it in an elementary school.

We hope that this special issue serves to support the readers’ future efforts in control engineering and sensing engineering education, and we thank the authors and reviewers of the papers.

This study proposes a HIL simulator for model-based development (MBD) education and checks its behavior. In recent years, product structures have become diverse and complex; further, short-term development with limited resources is required to respond to consumers’ needs. MBD using computer simulation is effective for the efficient execution of such developments. An increasing number of companies have introduced MBD; however, engineers who are newly engaged in such development do not always have sufficient experience. Therefore, in this study, the authors have proposed an educational program to learn the basics of MBD in a short period of time. However, the introduction of industrial hardware in the loop (HIL) simulator, which plays an important role in MBD, is expensive. The present study proposes a method of designing an educational HIL simulator by using a microcomputer board. The proposed educational HIL simulator can reduce the production cost of industrial HIL simulators and can be provided to individual participants undergoing MBD training. Using numerical examples and experimental results, we show that the proposed HIL simulator can perform a simulation of experimental equipment used in actual MBD education.

In recent years, instructional robot materials have often been used in robotics and engineering education. We use LEGO Mindstorms which is an educational robot development kit in its curriculum. In this subject, students are taught basic subjects such as robot mechanisms, robotic control, and programming. To enhance the subject’s educational effects, the students are set the objective of entry into a robot competition. In the subject, the students are grouped into teams comprising two or three members to undertake the aforementioned task, with the objective of improving their communication skills and problem-solving capacities. The effects of participation in the robot competition were observed in the improved performances in the robot competition implemented in a class (hereinafter called “classroom competition”) held after the SMART competition. In the questionnaire survey conducted at the end of the subject, the upper-class students, in particular, conveyed favorable views on the use of LEGO Mindstorms and participation in the robot competition. On comparing the realized educational effects on the first- and third-year students, positive effects were confirmed in both groups.

In recent years, in many educational institutions, PBL leaning has been introduced and there have been many cases of robots being used as learning material. The educational attempts using robot contests and the effects have been reported. One robot contest, the NHK Student Robocon, tests the skills of university, technical college, and polytechnic students. The contest challenges of the NHK Student Robocon require an extremely high level of skill. A research group of authors has worked at the NHK Student Robocon since 2009. In this article, our ten years of activity at the NHK Robocon is summarized, and we will give a description of the technical background of the mechanism and the control methods of manufactured robots. In addition, the contest’s educational effects during both a fiscal year of entry and a fiscal year of non-entry are verified through a comparison of the scores of a Robocon-related subject group before and after participating in the NHK Student Robocon. Consequently, we will report the results (knowledge).

Our aim was to motivate students to study control engineering and image processing. To this end, we designed a motivation system based on the ARCS model, developed by John M. Keller, to motivate learners. We used a drone as the control object. The ARCS model consists of four steps: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. The control process is performed by capturing images from the drone’s camera on a PC via Wi-Fi, and detecting a target color using an image processing technique. Then, the PC sends the control inputs from a PID controller back to the drone to track the target color by keeping it at the center of the images. With this system, students can gain knowledge on control engineering and image processing by tuning the parameters of PID controller and image processing, and observing the responses of the drone. To assess the effectiveness of our system, we requested 150 first-grade technical college students, who had no prior knowledge of control engineering and image processing, to attend our lecture. After the lecture, the students were asked to answer a questionnaire on their interests. The result demonstrated that over 80% of them expressed an interest in learning these two techniques.

The rapid growth of the information technology industry in recent decades requires an increasing number of programmers and engineers, as well as an excellent training environment for relevant human resources. Currently, school curricula promote information education and, since 2012, “measurement and control by programs” have become compulsory topics of study in the technology and home economics (technological field) class in junior high schools. In addition, it has been determined that programming education will be made a compulsory topic in elementary schools from 2020 onward. Thus, programming education is included in the mandatory education program and, accordingly, various associated teaching materials have been developed and distributed to date. However, adequate steps have not been taken to improve the information education skill of the teachers who use the aforementioned teaching materials. In particular, only very few teachers understand the essence of programming control, such as the role played by a program in measurement and control. Hence, there is an urgent need to train teachers to make them capable of providing programming education in school settings. Hence, in this study, we develop a teaching material that helps teachers understand the flow of measurement and control by program using an optical distance sensor and an actuator and design a class practice for the students in the faculty of education. Finally, based on this education practice, we discuss an educational effect of the aforementioned teaching material and its applicability in junior high school settings.

In 2017, the government announced the course of study guidelines. It showed the necessary qualification and ability for junior high school students and guidance on junior high school technology education. Because new content is included there, training of incoming teachers at junior high school is required. This paper proposes a training curriculum on measurement and control of junior high school technology. This training was practiced for junior high school teachers in Ehime. These members showed high evaluation. This training will enhance educational practice for junior high school students.

It is difficult to make an evaluation based solely on whether programming has been achieved. However, appropriate evaluation according to the achievement level leads to learners’ subjective programming learning, and to learning support that corresponds to individuals. Therefore, the quantitative evaluation of programming learning is as important as teaching and educational methods. Since programming education is being introduced to elementary and junior high schools, a programming evaluation method for this age is necessary. Therefore, this paper proposes a new concept of quantitatively evaluating the degree of achievement of tasks by programming. It assumes a unit in junior high school technology classes for learning measurement control, and uses teaching materials that have an autonomous cleaning robot as a theme. It is aimed at quantitatively evaluating the degree of accomplishment of a task by evaluating the extent to which the robot ran in a field, as seen in the room from a still picture taken multiple times.

In today’s day and age, we encounter a wide array of electronic devices such as personal computers, game machines, mobile phones, etc. in our daily life. Such devices are controlled through invisible sites. The measurement and control of these devices constitute such an essential technology for the modern society that they have to be formally studied at junior high school and beyond. To facilitate the smooth transition of students into the process of learning about such devices, education about them should preferably be introduced at the early stage of elementary school. However, that will make the elementary school’s curriculum too restrictive, as activities not described in the government course of studies cannot be implemented. In this study, therefore, we have implemented graduation work activities (teaching for measurement and control) in accordance with the government course of studies to teach science at elementary schools and have verified its effectiveness.

In Japan, programming education will be introduced in the Courses of Study for Elementary School from FY2020. Although various studies have been conducted on this topic, very few have examined Japanese elementary school computational thinking in terms of the developmental stages of elementary school children. Thus, we developed programming learning materials using concrete objects that can be understood by lower-elementary students. Specifically, we divided program-oriented thinking into three steps: concrete, logical, and abstract thinking; we then made the pupils carry out work in this order to encourage them to think of the sequence of actions necessary to implement the intended act, which involved the measurement and control of an illumination system. Furthermore, we discuss the validity of the proposed material based on questionnaire results of student participants and their parents of a workshop.

This study proposes a hierarchical proximity information processing system and a novel proximity sensor for realizing high-speed and robust grasp control of a robotic hand. The sensor requires both fast response and advanced situation judgment abilities. Therefore, a function that digitally samples individual reaction amounts of all detection elements is added to the net-structure proximity sensor (NSPS), which extracts the sum and center position of the distribution of reaction amounts of detection elements by high-speed analog computation on the sensor circuit. To integrate these two functions, we construct a circuit design method that enables the coexistence of a multichannel A/D converter circuit on the analog computing circuit of the NSPS without disturbing the current flow for sensing; the proposed sensor is called the “hierarchical proximity sensor.” An analysis of its characteristics indicates that the sensor can be used for feedback control of the fingertip position/posture and to estimate the curvature of objects. Through an experiment conducted using a robotic hand equipped with the proposed sensor, we confirmed that the fingertip can approach an object in 0.18 s based on the high-speed analog computation information, while the information for improving the motion can be obtained by comparing the temporal change in the finger joints with the digital sampling information of the process.

In this article, a framework for planning sidewalk-wise paths in data-limited pedestrian environments is presented by visually recognizing city blocks in 2D digital maps (e.g., Google Maps, and OpenStreet Maps) using contour detection, and by then applying graph theory to infer a pedestrian path from start to finish. Two main problems have been identified; first, several locations worldwide (e.g., suburban / rural areas) lack recorded data on street crossings and pedestrian walkways. Second, the continuous process of recording maps (i.e., digital cartography) is, to our current knowledge, manual and has not yet been fully automated in practice. Both issues contribute toward a scaling problem, in which the continuous monitoring and recording of such data at a global scale becomes time and effort consuming. As a result, the purpose of this framework is to produce path plans that do not depend on pre-recorded (e.g., using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)) or data-rich pedestrian maps, thus facilitating navigation for mobile robots and people with visual impairment. Assuming that all roads are crossable, the framework was able to produce pedestrian paths for most locations where data on sidewalks and street crossings were indeed limited at 75% accuracy in our test-set, but certain challenges still remain to attain higher accuracy and to match real-world settings. Additionally, we describe certain works in the literature that describe how to utilize such path plans effectively.

This paper proposes a new method for a depalletizing robot in distribution center to transfer cardboard boxes. Through the use of elastic joint mechanisms, the proposed method reduces the deformation and breakage of cardboard boxes as well as shifts in position and posture due to collapses of the stacks. To validate the proposed method, we developed a linear depalletizing robot that consists of a main arm that supports a vacuum suction type end effector via elastic joint mechanisms and a conveyor arm for conveying cardboard boxes. The proposed transfer method is characterized by a series of actions using the elastic joint mechanisms of the end effector to pick up and lift a cardboard box by two of its sides and then tilt and take it out of a roll box pallet on a conveyor. Tests show that the robot can successfully transfer cardboard boxes using only simple motions in spite of various changes in box position and posture, and that the new joint mechanisms operate effectively.

Conventional motion planners do not rely on previous experience when presented with a new problem. Trajectory prediction algorithms solve this problem using a pre-existing dataset at runtime. We propose instead using a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) to learn the distribution of the motion dataset and hence to generate trajectories for use as priors within the traditional motion planning approaches. We demonstrate, through simulations and by using an industrial robot arm with six degrees of freedom, that our trajectory prediction algorithm generates more collision-free trajectories compared to the linear initialization, and reduces the computation time of optimization-based planners.

Based on the design of an inertia-driven modular robot, this paper proposes a new design of cubic robot using snap-through-buckling mechanisms as actuators for achieving translational and rotational motion in multiple directions. Through experiments, the characteristics of the mechanism were obtained, and performance of the robot was assessed.