Many air conditioners use fan systems for heat exchange. Vibratory motion and noise in the conditioner occur when aerodynamic force of the rotating fan blades act on the cabinet of the air conditioner. Also, pressure variation of fan blade surface transmits to the motor-feet, and these transmitted forces excite support-structure of the motor. In the experimental apparatus of modeled air conditioner outdoor unit, we discussed the influence of the structure around the fan on the motor reaction forces. We also performed a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis using fluid flow analysis software PHOENICS, and obtained pressure distribution near fan. Based on the calculation results of pressure distribution near fan, experimental results were considered. On the other hand, vibration response of bell mouth when aerodynamic force acts it was calculated using the finite element method.

Ground-penetrating-radars (GPRs) are used for surveying underground-buried objects. In this paper, the authors proposed a method for reconstruction of upper surface contours in the vertical section of buried objects as a set of line elements. The line elements were obtained based on the condition that multiple ellipses provided by the different B-scope images satisfying a multiple root condition. The ellipses were defined by a constraint deduced from time-of-flight information in a B-scope image.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed through a field test.

A light-grid is a sensing device that consists of a number of pairs of light-emitting and light-receiving devices. These light-emitting and light-receiving devices are placed respectively in a linear manner. The light-grid detects objects that intercept the light axes between these pairs of devices. Owing to the plurality of the pairs, the light-grid can also coarsely estimate the size of the intercepting object. We employ the light-grid to obtain a coarse two-dimensional binary image of the intercepting object which is in motion, taking advantage of the dynamic effect available in such a situation. In this study, the obtained coarse binary image is applied for the identification of intercepting objects. A basic approach is developed. The object identification problem is formulated based on Hu moment invariants, which are characteristics values of image expected to be suitable to image identification of this type.

In our previous studies, it is found that human elbow joint motion can be altered from his/her intended motion only by giving vibration stimulation on antagonist muscle. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of the frequency change to elbow joint motion alteration. The experiment of this study is designed to quantitatively investigate the amount of the elbow joint motion alteration from subject's intended motion. During this experiment, subjects made elbow joint extension motion. Vibration stimulation was added to biceps brachii during elbow joint extension motion and its frequency was changed in each trials. The experimental results suggest the frequency change remarkably affects the amount of elbow joint extension motion alteration and it has important suggestion for the perception-assist with vibration stimulation.

The bilateral control is often implemented in master-slave robot system for providing a force feedback function. According to the requirements of tasks, the control parameters can be adjusted to optimize the haptic sensitivity of operator when the slave device contacts the environment. However, the quantitative relationship between various parameters and the haptic sensitivity has not been clarified.

In this research, firstly, we introduce an index for quantifying the operator's haptic sensitivity in which the velocity information of the master is used. Secondly, the effects from changes of various parameters to the index is analyzed. Finally, we establish a function to calculate the haptic sensitivity index just from the control parameters.

Tracheal intubation of medical procedures is an indispensable procedure for securing the airway during general anesthesia etc., but its proficiency is evaluated by expert subjectively. For efficiency improvement of this procedure education, indices that can be evaluated objectively is required. The whole body movement of the doctor is measured with motion capture during the procedure. We researched to obtain skill level from the characteristics of its operation. The motion of experts with long years of experience and junior residents were recorded over the entire body of 21 joints at 120 Hz and set as a dataset based on the angular velocities of each joint. We propose the method to identify experts and first scholars by deep learning or support vector machine.

This paper proposes a method for inducing drivers’ spatial attention by presenting visual stimulation in their peripheral visual field. Computer-generated images of forward driving scenes were projected on a screen 6 m in width, 1.8 m in height and with a 140° viewing angle. By varying the viewing angle at which the preceding stimulation was presented in the peripheral visual field and the time interval between the presentation of the preceding stimulation and the detected stimulation in the central visual field, conditions were found for assisting prompt detection of the latter visual stimulation.

The purpose of this study is development and evaluation of robot operation method using Natural User Interface (NUI).

In recent years, NUIs such as gesture operation and voice recognition are beginning to spread. These are intuitive and easy to understand operations than the conventional User Interface (UI). Research on robot operation using NUI has been conducted. However, it is difficult to move the robot within the environment as intended by the operator, as there is a discrepancy between the intention of the operator and the actual movement, and kinematics does not match between the human and the power wheeled steering robot.

In particular, I propose a method to estimate the intention from the motion of the operator and generate behavior of the robot about the operation method assuming the operator's hand as a differential power wheeled steering robot.

In a computer hard disk device, flying height in a nanometer order has been achieved due to the gas lubrication action. A new type of flying head slider mechanisms whose air bearing surface (ABS) or disk surface has local temperature distributions such as thermal fly-height control (TFC) and heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) have been proposed in order to increase the recording density. Moreover, recently, He-enclosed HDDs have been researched and developed to achieve high performance, because Helium has smaller windage loss and higher heat conductivity than air. Thus, it is becoming increasingly important to analyze the flying characteristics of head sliders over a running disk using the thermo-molecular gas-film lubrication (t-MGL) equation considering temperature distributions and accommodation coefficients at the boundary. In this paper, we numerically calculated the effects of accommodation coefficients on the static and dynamic lubrication characteristics in Air/He as an ambient gas.

In recent years, studies have been conducted to assist the user’s operation on a driving support system such as collision avoidance and lane keep assist. However, in order to construct such a system, special ordering of the device is indispensable, and cost and device configuration become problematic. Therefore, there is a need for a system that is low cost and easy to configure. In this research, we aim to develop a vibration presentation interface that can support operation by mounting a device. As a preliminary step of operation support, we verify the relation between vibration stimulus and operating characteristics, and aim to support of proficiency in operation suitable for each user from the relation between vibration stimulus and operation characteristics.

In recent years, demand of intelligent robots is increasing. When such an intelligent robot performs cooperative work with a human, it is necessary to predict human intention and behavior in order not to apply unnecessary load or stress to human beings. Currently, techniques for predicting such intention and behavior of human beings have been extensively studied, but it is difficult to produce results beyond human ability simply by matching actions to humans based on predictions, and limits on efficiency etc. However, giving instructions from the robot side to humans may be stressful, and it is necessary to conduct casual guidance. Therefore, in this research, we focus on human passing each other, and model human evasive behavior by using gaze and neural network. Based on this model, the aim is to not only perform actions tailored to human beings but also conduct induction by robot. As a result, we showed that it is possible to change the choice of behavior by giving subjects a slight change.

This paper addresses the mechanism for obtaining intake amount and thrust by the drone 's motor. The mechanism is composed of a diaphragm pump and a brushless motor. The intake amount can be realized by the rotation force of the motor. The compact mechanism that gets buoyancy and the air-intake from the rotation of the motor is proposed. Finally, the response time of the intake is verified by the rotational velocity by current value

Recently, applications of the illusory kinesthesia, which is a misdetection of own motion, have been focused on. The illusory kinesthesia is expected to be utilized for habilitations, motion skill assist for sports and so on. However, the mechanism of the phenomena is not clear yet. Therefore, this study investigates the effect to EMG signals of the illusory kinesthesia. Some experimental results suggested that the illusory kinesthesia relates to human muscle activity.

In this study, a system that can print in high accuracy when printing high viscous material with electrostatic inkjet method has been developed in order to create a high quality food product. However, when creating a 3D structure with the developed system, rheology of the printing material needs to be considered. Therefore, we have also investigated the influence of rheology by printing food sample within different printing surface temperature and printing time lapse. The appropriate surface temperature and printing time course have been determined by the study in order to print 3-dimensional structure for food material.

Thin film electrode composed of parylene film and thin gold electrode has biocompatibility and high flexibility as their thickness are only under 1μm. Because of its softness, monitoring extracellular electric potential while following the movement of cardiomyocyte is enabled. But the extracellular electric potential of cardiomyocyte is approximately 1mV which is very low. Therefore, the very small biological signal disappears among the background noise at the time of measurement. Thus reducing the effect of noise around the measuring environment is needed for measuring this very small extracellular electric potential. In this study, we examined the method of reducing noise when measuring extracellular electric potential by using thin film electrode.

Thick three-dimensional (3-D) cardiac tissues have a great future potential in regenerative medicine for severe heart disease. Our laboratory has developed a fabrication method of cardiac tissues by stacking cell sheets. However, there is a limitation for stacking of cell sheets because of the cell necrosis due to lack of oxygen or nutrition. Therefore, for creating a thick tissue, it is necessary to supply oxygen and nutrients by sufficient vascular networks into the stacked cell sheet tissue and perfusion culture. In this study, we developed a new technology for vascularization with a tissue perfusion bioreactor system in vitro and attempted to create a cardiac tissues.

Lamination of cell sheets was attempted in order to create three-dimensional tissue. However, as the number of laminated sheets increases, sufficient amount of oxygen and nutrients cannot reach inner tissue which results to the death of cells within the inner tissue. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare blood vessels between the cell sheets. Currently, it is difficult to create vascular structure larger than 100μm within biological tissue composed only of cells. In this study, construction of three-dimensional tissue by creating 20 to 200 micrometers diameter blood vessel structure between cell sheets and perfusion with culture medium was aimed. By perfusion of medium, it is highly possible to create a tissue which has closer structure as living body than the conventional artificial tissue.

The purpose of this study is proposal of alternative therapy for heart transplantation by creating tubular cardiac tissue with pump function. There is the limitation of cell sheet layers due to the limitation of oxygen and nutrient diffusion. Therefore it is necessary to create vascular network in the tissue in order to provide oxygen and nutrient. Our laboratory succeeded in fabricating a thick tissue using a vascular bed. In this study, the small intestine was used as tubular vascular bed. Small intestine has advantages that it has a sufficient vascular network and connectable vessels. In order to fabricate a tubular cardiac tissue, three layered cell sheets were put on inner wall of tubular vascular bed made from small intestine. We developed a novel fabricating method in which silicone balloon was used under negative pressure condition.

The development of artificial organs and artificial living tissues for the purpose of transplantation therapy and drug discovery screening from the development of bioscience is thriving. In order to prepare a highly functional living tissue, it is necessary to reproduce the complicated structure of the cell tissue in vivo outside the living body. Therefore, we thought that the structure of the cellular tissue can be precisely controlled by printing and molding gellan gum gel that can be used as a growth scaffold for cells by electrostatic inkjet. Gellan gum is a polysaccharide derived from bacteria, and its aqueous solution reacts with a trace amount of cation to gelate, so it is higher in biocompatibility than alginic acid gel. In this research, we investigated the printing characteristics of gellan gum ink using electrostatic ink jet.

In recent years, fabrication of three-dimensional tissue has attacted attention in the field of regenerative medicine. However, when fabricating a thick tissue, them is a problem that oxygen and nutrients are not supplied due to the delay of angiogenesis, and the inside of the tissue is damaged. In contrast, algae produce oxygen under light irradiation and consume carbon dioxide and ammonia, which is a harmful metabolite for cells. From this, it was thought that the culture environment was improved by co-culturing animal cells and algae. In this study, we investigated the method of position control of algae in co-cultiation of animal cells and algae for the purpose of making a thick three-dimensional tissue.

The crowd behavior recognition system is a subsystem of a distributed cooperative dynamic evacuation guidance system, and it detects and predicts crowd flow and abnormality occurrence by using machine learning method such as deep learning with visual and depth information obtained by RGB-D camera. The distributed cooperative dynamic evacuation guidance system aims to suggest evacuation routes at extensive evacuation situations by autonomously cooperation among plural sensors and evacuation guiding devices. In this paper, an edge device is employed for crowd behavior recognition and anomaly detection under a concept of the edge computing. The system which has been considered so far is implemented on the JETSON TX1 which is employed as the edge device. Some results of evaluation of that implementation are reported.

Haptic perception is subjective because the information depends on our bodies and the motor control is based on sensory feedback. We are trying to reveal, evaluate, share, and augment subjective haptic perception with wearable sensing and sensory feedback technologies, and these technologies have potentialities to be applied into design, manufacturing, welfare, and medical applications. In this paper, our tactile devices developed from these viewpoints are introduced: a wearable skin vibration sensor that can detect skin-propagated vibration from the fingertip when the fingertip contacts with an object and a palpation system having a tactile sensor and a tactile display for laparoscopic surgery that utilizes surgeon's clinical sense and skill.

In order to evaluate ultra surface layer of the solid sample, we focused on Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) with metal overlayer method. By evaluation of different thickness Ag film on sample surface, it can be observed SERS effect of the ultra surface layer. SERS effect is the largest at a Ag film thickness of 4 nm to 6 nm. It is also observed that the shape of enhanced spectrum around 1300 cm^-1 is different. It is considered that the Raman spectra of the ultra surface layer is selectively enhanced.

This paper introduces the case study of control design approach for position control system using piezoelectric actuators. To achieve the high precision control using piezoelectric actuators, the disturbances such as nonlinearities due to hysteresis and creep phenomena should be compensated. In addition, resonant vibration modes in the mechanism lead to residual vibrations in the positioning or may even destabilize the system. For the hysteresis compensation, Plandtl-Ishlinskii model-based inverse compensation is introduced to linearize the plant characteristic, where the parameters are identified using the adaptive algorithm in real time. As one of the vibration suppression approaches, a self-sensing technique using simple external circuit is introduced to detect and suppress the vibration modes.

We developed smart biodevices to measure action potential of artificial tissue structures. In recent days, biodevieces to measure biological information are strongly required for drug discovery, improvement of quality of life (QOL) of patient and other bioengineering fields. Biocompatible flexible sensors are fabricated utilizing printed electronics technology. Artificial tissue structures are fabricated utilizing cell sheet technology, bioprint technology, and other biofabrication technologies. When the flexible sensors are set on artificial tissue structure, then action potential of the artificial tissue structure was measured. In this presentation, we show results of the developed biodevices.