A robotic manipulator, suspended from a ceiling of a general house, with an easily operated human interface is proposed in this paper. A bedridden user can easily manipulate his/her belongings by using the robotic manipulator. A new image recognition scheme using an active illumination is investigated, and it was confirmed that a reflective plastic plate was detected.

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A new health care system using a simplified robot face is proposed. Movement of human face has been measured in order to develop the simplified robot face by using a motion analysis program. Transformations of human face were confirmed depending on few emotions.

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The goal of this paper is to propose mechanism of locomotion for micro robot moving in human body and to evaluate their propulsion. In this paper, we poposed three types of mechanism: drill type, vibration type, and liquid pressure type. The drill type uses a drill driven by a D. C. motor. The vibration type moves according to a movement of hair caused by a vibration motor. The liquid pressure type is driven by a movement of a syringe and a piston. We measured propulsion of them and concluded that the drill type and the liquid pressure type are more hopeful than the vibration type.

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Employing our previously-developed measuring and training device for human dynamical balancing capability, we carried out an experiment in which a trainee once learned how to get on the device through the training, and he tried to get on the same device again after the two months. The result was that the trainees succeeded in getting on the device continuously soon after a small number of trails. This suggests that training effect is long-lasting, and the device with fixed structure has limitations as a training device. Then, how the once-obtained capability with a device is generalized for a trainee to get on a device with the different structure? In order to clarify this point, we newly designed and prototyped a building block type device whose structure could be changed within a certain range. In this report, we illustrate this device precisely.

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We proposed and developed a new type of micro valve for the hydraulic pressure driven active catheter. By using this valve, we are able to produce the safe active catheter without electricity. In this report, we simplified the structured design of the valve and increased the manufacturing reliability. Moreover, we introduced multipurpose fluid channel to the active catheter and experimentally verified the utility of the channel.

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We analyzed Non-dimension of the Band Pass Valve characteristic that was the basic principle of a hydraulic pressure drive method of active catheter. The quantity design method of an atheter was established by the fluid experiment that used the expansion model based on aquired data.

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We have proposed and developed a micro active catheter of 400μm in diameter. The catheter was composed of a bellows made of thin polymer membrane, a syringe and a micro tube connecting them. The bellows at the tip of the catheter was bent at an arbitary angle by water pressure supplied from the syringe through the micro tube. The fabrication of the catheter was made possible by the MeME process we originally developed earlier. The catheter has high safety because it uses no electricity for operation. The membrane structure of the bellows also improves the safety, by giving softness at the tip of the catheter to avoid damage to the blood vessel. The catheter is made of only polymer material, and therefore fully MRI compatible. This micro active catheter with extreme smallness and high safety should open the next stage of catheterization.

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In this paper, a two-finger micro hand system for handling of an oven and a cultured cell is described. The micro hand has a simple structure composed of two serial links. It removes the backlash in each joint by employing a spring in order to realize micro order motion. High sensitive force sensors are installed in the finger tips in order to detect the grasping force of a cell. Linear motions of the finger tip in a horizontal and vertical direction and the force sensor was evaluated experimentally. From the experiments, it was confirmed that the basic functions of the system for handling of a cell was achieved.

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We have studied a differential gear transmission for low-speed drive of ultrasonic motor. This transmission outputs the difference of two ultrasonic motors, therefore it can output very low speed when both motors move at close speed in the ounter direction, and it outputs the same speed as the maximum of single motor, when both motors moves at maximum speed in the same direction. Such wide speed selectivity is useful for path control of MRI-compatible manipulator/robot, because MRI-compatibility needs ultrasonic motor, which however has narrow speed selectivity. In this paper, we reported its structure, kinematics, and speed selectivity against minimum speed of ultrasonic motor.

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A contol system of a clutch mechanism with pneumatic passive elements is developed for Ankle Foot Orthoses. This system consists of an internal pressure control system and gait sensor system is small enough to mount in on Ankle Foot Orthoses. A gait sensor system distinguishes a walking gait from others and the pressure control system adjusts a maximum constraint force of a clutch system with the sensor signal. Experiments are executed to confirm the ability of the sensor system.

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Humans are the only living things which make a erect bipedalism. They are evolving the leg extremity-below a pelvis, and gained the more complicated and more sophisticated walk system. In the depertment of the bio-mechanics or the rehabilitation, movement analysis instrument has been developed. But, almost of these are attended by the feeling of a constraint, or a measurement place will be limited. We makes the measurement suit which can survay operation of the leg, without giving a feeling of a restraint as much as possible as an experiment. And the in-sole sensor shoes, used for it, are developed.

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In this paper, we describe a human-assistance robotic system to support the aged. The voice-enabled interface based on the IBM Speech SDK and touch input interface were developed in order to enable the elderly and disabled users to control the robot system easily. We introduce the architecture of the developed system and give some experimental results.

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We investigate on development of myoelectric elbow prostheses combined by ultrasonic motor and magneto-rheological (MR) fluid. Ultrasonic motors have some special unique features, such as high-torque under low-speed operation, compact size, and no electromagnetic noise. MR fluids are materials that change their rheological characteristics by an applied magnetic field. By use of the proposed prostheses, it appears to be realization of powered prosthesis that are operated with compliance. On other hand, use of the threshold level or amplitude of EMG (electromyogram) is often adopted as control methods of practical myoelectric prostheses using microcomputer. However, this method is not always suitable for the proposed prostheses. In order to development of an EMG contoller using general-purpose microcomputer for the myoelectric elbow prostheses, in this study, we observe EMG of biceps and tricepts muscle of arm, on isotonic and isometric contractions.

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With aging, human skin develops a dry condition called senile xerosis. The skin lesion can be prevented by daily skin care, for example, by applying an ointment containing moisturing factors several times in a day. Aged persons, however, have difficulties in accessing their back and rely therefore on nursing care for such treatment. But note that in underpopulated areas such nursing care may not always be available. To tackle this problem, a skincare robot has been proposed and developed. In this paper, the feasibility of the project is confirmed by real experiments, applying ointment to a human's back. The system developed recognizes the shape of the body, plans the motion path of the end-effector, and executes the task without applysing any excessive forces.

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We are developing the robot system for tele-ultrasound imaging diagnosis. This system consists of the master-slave robot system in order to use probes of the ultrasound diagnostic equipment for the telemedicine. This paper reports about a development of the slave robot and remote control the slave robot.

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Total hip arthroplasty (THA) is performed to replace all or part of the hip joint with an artificial joint for patients who have rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis of the hip joint. In this paper, we propose a 7 DOF hip joint motion simulator for the analysis of dislocation and wear of the artificial hip joint. A DC servo motor and six linear actuators (parallel mechanism) have used to construct the simulator that can generate the desired joint angles and contact forces for the daily life motion. The effectiveness of the proposed system was confirmed by the computer simulation.

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In this paper, the walking assist machine for leg paralysis users is proposed. The proposed walking assist machine is designed as a modular package based on wire winding up type pulling mechanism. This modular package allows us to replace it at the any position where we need to be supposed. In the experiment, this modular package installed in the hip part and toe part, and the performance was evaluated. As a result, it was able to be confirmed that a modular package had an alternative function of the bi-articular muscle by flexion of knee joint and ankle joint at same time.

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On the slope or rough road, hemiplegic subject can't use a multilegged walking stick in relief, because it can't adapt to them and the axis of the stick can't be fixed. To use a multilegged walking stick in relief, it is important to keep the axis of the stick vertical. To keep the axis of the stick vertical, we proposed new mechanism of the tips of the stick. It consists of sylinders, solenoid valves and push switches. By contracting and locking the tips of the stick, it adapts to road surface and the users of the stick can keep the axis of the stick vertical.

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We have developed a new mobility aid "Tread Walk". It helps older persons to perform "extending mobility activities," "maintaining body function" and "natural walking appearance". The mobility aid consists of two main components; a six-wheel driving part and an operating part including two belts treadmill. This permits the user to walk naturally while a servo motor amplifies normal walking speed on the treadmill system. Here, we propose natural operation from gait movement. The new concept is to measure acceleration/decceleration force of one's legs by separated belt and to use the input for change direction.

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The manual clinical examinations are commonly used in orthopedic clinical practice to estimate the state of knee ligament injury. However, the manual clinical examination results depend on a doctor's intuition and experience greatly because they are judged by the feel of the reaction of affected part to the doctor's hand. Therefore, we proposed a manual clinical examination assisting system that provides force acting on a knee joint and a lower leg motion quantitatively to a doctor. This paper focused on force acting on a knee joint. And we evaluated estimation accuracy of the force calculated by manual clinical examination assisting system.

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This paper provides the study on the ticket machine in consideration of the color universal design. Color universal design is an approach to the design of products and environments to be usable by visual disabilities, including persons with color blindness. We determine the color arrangement of the ticket machine's display by means of the results of the questionnaire. We evaluate the usability of the ticket machine using the computer simultation.

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This study conducted the running experiment on the various operation methods of the electric wheelchair. There are a joystick type, a push-button type, and a voice control type in the operation methods of an electric wheelchair. The joystick type used what is generally marketed, and the push-button type and the voice control type were made as an experiment newly. In the experiment, it ran the course using above-mentioned operation methods, and measured transit time and the turning counts.

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We think the indoor navigation system to be necessary in common places, a department store, a supermarket and so on in the future. We showed the way to measure the position and the direction with arrayed IC tags and two antennas without other sensors. This paper describes applying an indoor navigation system by the technique to a real environment. IC tags, which store x-coordinate, y-coordinate and area number, are regularly laid between a floor made of reinforced concrete and tile carpets. The IC tags are read by a reader system with two antennas. The navigation algorithm utilizes the Dijkstra method that is a shortest path program. By the system, we succeeded in indoor navigation with the speed at about 7km/h.

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It is a formidable issue how robots can show the behaviors corresponding to human's ones since the dissimilar body. As a simple case for such correspondence problem, this paper presents a robot that acquires vowels through the interaction with its caregiver. We focus on the roles of maternal imitation since it could instruct the correspondence of the sounds. Furthermore, we suppose that it causes "unconscious anchoring" in which the caregiver's imitated voice is performed unconsciously, closely to one of his/her own vowels, and helps to leading robot's utterances to be more vowel-like. We experimented under the assumptions in which the robot knows the caregiver's vowels and the rough estimate of mapping between the caregiver's utterance and the robot's one. Though the experiments with a caregiver, we show that a robot acquires more vowel-like utterances than one without such a caregiver even when it is given different types of mapping functions.

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Joint attention, that is a behavior to attend to the object that the other gazes at, is an important ability not only for human-human communication but also for human-robot communication. Previous works have proposed mechanisms to acquire joint attention based on the casual structure about face pattens and own gaze shift. However, a robot needs to know which pairs of states and actions it should focus on to acquire joint attention. The robot needs to detect the causality among the previous observation, the action, and the current observation. In this paper, we focus on the transfer entropy that indicates the influence of a state and an action on an experience. We calculate transfer entropies in face-to-face interaction and show that a robot can find the pair that includes the causal structure and that the robot can acquire joint attention based on the pair.

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This paper proposes an approach of object category acquisition based on object shaking behavior. By varying the holding position and shaking the objects, the robots are able to acquire object categories which can be generalized to objects with different size and shape. Experimental results are shown where poor control robot with McKibben actuators acquires and recognizes object categories of three types, namely rigid objects, paper materials and PET bottles with water. The proposed approach seems effective for object categorization of domestic robots. The study also indicates the possible role of object shaking behavior in object category acquisition of infants, which has not been discussed so much in the field of developmental psychology so far.

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This paper proposes a learning model that enables a robot to acquire a body image for parts of its body that are invisible to itself. A robot estimates the invisible hand positions using the Jacobian between the displacement of the joint angles and the optical flow of the hand. When the hand touhches one of the invisible tactile sensor units on the face, the robot associates this sensor unit with the estimated hand position. In addition, we propose a model to discriminate the tactile sensor units each of which is corresponded to each facial part based on the discontinuity of sensor value. Then finally, the robot becomes able to associate them with the feature points of parts in the image of other's face.

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There are around one million disabled people who can't walk due to disease or accidents. In order to assist their walking, many kinds of gait orthosis have been developed. Especially, Hart Walker is one of the most sophisticated orthosis for improving walking-functions. Then we have been developed "Active Walker" by implementing McKibben artificial muscles to Hart Walker. Active Walker is able to perform various gait patterns for training. However, since Active Walker needs special adjustment by physiotherapists, it is unsuitableness for early rehabilitation. On the other hand, it is important to recover walking-functions soon after diseases or accidents. Then we have developed new Active Walker that has simple adjustment mechanisms for early rehabilitation.

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The individual difference in structural eye stiffness might cause the misestimation of the internal eye pressure (IOP: IntraOcular Pressure). In this paper, we measured the eye stiffness for 60 subjects including glaucoma patients with high IOP over 30[mmHg]. The displacement and the contact area are simultaneously measured in the experiment and the experimental results show that some subjects have different deformation even with same IOP estimated by the conventional tonometer.

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We developed a walking assist machine, which machine uses a spatial parallel link mechanism for the elderly or rehabilitants. The flat steps of the assist machine move in parallel with the ground and can support the legs of a person including the soles. Furthermore, in order to support walking in indoors, we investigated the assist methods of turning around during walking and walking on a slope or stairs. The machine was equipped a gyro sensor and an ultrasonic sensor, the angle of the slope and the size of stairs can be recognized and the machine could control according to the signal of the sensors. As a result of the experiment, the equipped person could turn around during walking and walk in a slope or stairs at will. The subject assisted by the machine was able to walk on a slope up to the angle of plus or minus fifteen degrees.

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Injection is the most commonly performed invasive procedure in the hospital. However, the introduction of a needle into a vein in the injection still correlates closely with clinical skills and experiences of clinical workers without relation to advances in medical technology. It is often difficult to find the vein and to insert the needle into the blood vessel, especially if the patient is an infant whose pannicule is thick and blood vessel is thin compared with adults. Multiple failed attempts at needle insertion can incerase patient discomfort with traumas. Therefore, this paper describes the results of preliminary experiments to develop an assistive device tht enables medical staff to achieve an accurate needle puncture into a vein even if the blood vessel is difficult to identify.

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Recently, we see many portable device users walking, using eniail service and internet contents. Such an activity is dangerous because it makes users less alert to surrounding obstacles. Therefore we set out to develop a. portable Obstacle-Recognition-Support-Device that widely secures the walking safety of the users. We proposed. the estimation method of obstacle recognizability while using portable device based on the body characteristics and the concentration rate t.o the work. We showed the experimental results of an attention power of testees to the obstacles when the intensity of given warning was changed according to the working strength and obstacle recognizability.

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This study proposes safety and comfort of wheelchair users whilewheelchair driving. Wheelchair users are get body vibrations in thily life, caused from various road conditions such as bumps, uneven terrain, tactile, curb ascent / descent, and a door threshold, and other barriers. Such vibrations causes discomfort and further injury. New casters with shock absorbing mechanism has been developedto reduce vibrations and to improve wheelchair user comfort. The peak-to-peak values and power spectral of accelerations were evaluated whether new casters reduce shock vibrations transmitted to users as compared to conventional casters that solid tire, air tire, and urethane tire caster wheel. Casters with suspension and air tire caster demonstrated effectiveness of reducing body vibrations.

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This paper proposes the mimesis from 2D partial observation of vector field. Its framework is HMM based mimesis model for human motion understanding. The algorithm is extended into motion understanding from monocular image sequences (eg., unlabeled markers information or marker-less texture information). Various conversions (by kinematics, coordinate transformation, and projection) of symbols are processed. With the particle filter of the transformation matrix, the humanoid estimates human pose, which is the transformation matrix between the human's coordinate and humanoid's coordinate. Vector field is used for natural motion understanding.

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Babies' motor skill improve through touching their surroundings. To tackle a mystery of babies' motor development, we built a baby robot and endowed it with soft pressure-sensitive tactile sensor over full body. We instantiate how to process the tactile information. The robot can detect unacclimatized state during crawling and discriminate between static postures. We conclude our robot system is sufficient to test models of babies' motor development.

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For new robot controller, motor development mechanism of human is focused. This research aims at making clear mechanism of getting body movements. We propose two essenses, (1) compressions of the motor command redundancy, and (2) memories of the motion. A neural model is constructed, caputuring these essenses and essential features of biological systems. Experiments with one-joint two-link twelve-muscle model is carryed out. Through them, it is shown that the model has the ability of getting body movements. In addition, this model has the pull-in ability. This result suggests that this model can correspond some nerve system.

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This paper describes new design of a 6 DOF anthropomorphic robot arm driven by antagonistic pairs of pneumatic actuators. We adopt anthropomorphic open joints which enables unique design of its shoulder and the forearm. The shoulder has a ball-like joint which is driven by 10 pneumatic muscles. The forearm consists of parallel links which imitates human structure.

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We propose a concept of "mobile microscope" for handheld use, which enable various places to he observable. We propose an image stabilization method for images from microscope effected by hand-shake. This method is based on high-speed visual feedback with an inclmed image sensor to measure the 3D movements of a microscope. We developed a trial microscope system employing the method without a built-in actuator. Experimental results showed that images from a handheld microscope can he stabilized by the proposal method.

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Current autofocus technique in the microscope lacks speed, and it takes about one second to focus on the object. It was a bottleneck of the speed-up of the microscope measurement. To solve this problem, we have proposed "depth from diffraction" method that can estimate depth of cells under microscope from their diffraction pattern. In this paper, we propose a new algolism to estimate the depth position of cells with wider range using "Depth From Diffraction", and validated its effectiveness from autofocusing experiment.

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This paper presents micromanipulator made of PDMS (polydimethylsiloxan), which is featured by its small, soft, and safe characteristics. Micromanipulator is driven by pneumatic balloon actuator (PBA) and detects contact or stiffness of an object by fluid-resistive bending sensor. The integrated tactile sensor has a perfect compatibility with flexible PBA. That is to say, there is no negative influence to the flexibility by attaching sensor. We researched characteristics of each compositional unit to improve the function of micromanipulator. In future works, we apply micromanipulator to the master-slave robot system using haptic interface. This system will improve the accuracy and safety of manipulation, and operator will be able to manipulate object more viscerally.

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We propose a new technique of cutting of egg cells using micro fluidic chip. In the previous, embryo manipulation, the nucleus of a cow's egg cell is removed and replace it with a modified nucleus of another cell, is performed with manual operation of human hand and mechanical manipulator. However, the method needs a lot of time and energy of the operator. Therefore, we propose a new method of remove of a nucleus from egg cells. In this paper, the cell cutting method and experimental result are reported.

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We have previously shown that a saw-tooth surface with only horizontal vibration, simple planar and symmetric, can feed along microparts. The microparts move forward because they adhere to the saw-tooth surface more in the backward direction than in the forward direction. We studied the movement of smaller 0603-type capacitors (size: 0.6×0.3×0.3 mm, weight: 0.3 mg). The capactors rotated on the saw-tooth surface because the pitch was relatively large for the 0603-type capacitors. We examined the decrease of feeding velocity caused by the rotational motion of the smaller capacitors.

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A comfortable communication between man and machine is createded by adjusting the essence of non-verbal communication into the design of a machine.

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This paper demonstrates a prototype test bed for usability studies of a multi-modal language for directing robots, using a Sony AIBO and JULIAN, a grammar-based speech recognition engine. We developed a grammar for spoken commands based on Japanese in order to simplify command understanding and an event-driven system to interpret multi-modal directions. In our pilot studies, we confirmed our robot can properly react to spoken, non-verbal and multi-modal directions by humans. Results from recent experiments involving subjects unfamiliar with robots are also reported and discussed.

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In this paper, we present a trajectory generation method for companion robot "SELF" with which humans do not get bored. A red ball and a blue ball are displayed on the computer. A human moves the red ball with a track point and a PC moves the blue ball. In using this model, the impressions that the robot behaviors give to the human are examined. We analyze the behaviors of human and generate four basic actions by using spline curve. Combining these actions, the behaviors of the blue ball are generated. The impressions that various robot behaviors give to the human are analyzed through Semantic Differential method.

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Android robots that have a human-like appearance have been developed recently. The purpose of android robots is to realize realistic communication between human and robot by implementation of human-like behaviors. Then knowledge and techniques for generating human-like natural motions and behaviors with android robot are required. In face-to-face communication, we can observe that the speaker nods during his utterance, and we call this behavior "Speaker's nod". Thus, in this study, we tried to realize realistic "Speaker's nod" as a natural behavior with receptionist robot SAYA that has human-like appearance. Therefore we experimentally investigated the expression-timing, the angle and the angular velocity of the human "Speaker's nod", and we implemented "Speaker's nod" to SAYA based on the investigation results.

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Laser manipulation, which is well known as optical tweezers, is one of the most powerful techniques for manipulating micron-sized objects under an optical microscope. Three-dimensional (3D) manipulation of arbitrarily shaped objects under an optical microscope is of widespread importance. We have developed two PC controlled 3D laser manipulation systems with excellent user-interfaces and image processing functions. In this paper we show the results of several demonstrations using these systems; namely the 3D manipulation of micron-sized objects with non-spherical shape (for example, whisker, diatom and so on).

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This paper reports the design and fabrication process of an exoskeletal microarm. The research of the microarm is part of a new concept of endoscopes designed for endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) operation. This novel ESD endoscope has two suction grippers to hold the lesion skin, and a cautery knife to cut. The grippers and cautery knife need to be manipulated at the end of the endoscope, thus a powerful yet small arm is needed. We focused on the shape memory alloy (SMA) for its high work output unit volume and its high power/mass ratio. However, the previously researched SMA actuated microarm bends by deforming its entire body. This mechanism makes it difficult to calculate the position of its end tip, necessary for the control of the grippers and the knife. Here, we propose an exoskeletal microarm. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomer is used to fabricate the microarm using a photolithography technique. The microarm is coated with hardening epoxy polymer, leaving only the joint part of the microarm uncoated. By placing an angle sensor at the joint, we are able to calculate the position of the microarm end. Selection and placement of the angle sensor and other parts of the new ESD endoscope is to be studied in the future.

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Nanobiomanipulation system is proposed for the single cell analysis with environmental-scanning electron microscope(ESEM). In this work, we observe the mutite type vibrio cells dispersed by some buffers with ESEM. The mechanical property of yeast cells are measured by the AFM cantilever probe modified their tips by FIB.

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FIB-CVD has proven its great potential in the fabrication of 3D nano-structured devices with high precision and accuracy. In this paper, we show the fabrication of a FIB-CVD nano temperature sensor over the tip of a cantilever, to act as an end-effectors temperature sensor. The FIB-CVD temperature sensors were constructed by consequent deposition and etching of tungsten over a piezo type AFM cantilevers which have built in electrodes. The sensor was calibrated in water using the heating stage of an environmental scanning electronic microscope. The experimental results demonstrate the great potential of FIB-CVD thermal sensors for sensing temperature in different environments

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