Our purpose is developing the human assisting robot, which can replace the wheel chair, guide dog or service dog. We developed the mobile robot with four legs and four wheels in tip of each leg (NR002). NR002 can detect and move up and down stairs. In this paper, we propose the method for controlling robot with force sensor, and develop the guide dog robot NWR001. NWR001 is two-wheeled mobile robot. Driving wheels are located in side of NWR001. And, caster wheels are located in anteroposterior position. This caster wheel can control height. Therefore, NWR001 can move on curved surface or canted floor safely. We used virtual mass and virtual viscous damping for conversion to moving velocity from force input. We realized superrational control method.

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In this study, the proof experiment of the pattern which combined the colors of the brightness contrast value judged to be able to improve the visibility of the Tactile Walking Surface Indicator (hereafter referred to as "TWSI") to verify the visibility in the state actually constructed on the floor side was done. The illuminance confirmed the visibility of the TWSI (discriminability) under the twilight vision (5lux), the pavement illumination environment (10lux) at nighttime, and photopic vision (500lux) environment about the TWSI set up on the palette of the floor side replacement device. It became the result of verifying the result of a current brightness contrast experiment and the color characteristic measurement experiment from the result of these proof experiments.

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A joystick car drive system for wheelchair users is presented in this paper. The system enables handicapped person to drive a car with a single hand. The joystick operation in back and forth direction controls acceleration or deceleration of a car while that in left and right direction rotates a steering wheel to turn. The initial prototype of a steering wheel drive system is designed and built. The prototype is tested on a cockpit simulator by wheelchair users to investigate the realizability of the proposed joystick system.

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In this paper, we propose a practical robotic follower adopting "Hyper-Tether" concept for detecting a foregoing person to support daily life for a patient with Home Oxygen Therapy. And to achieve such purpose, we developed a prototype of the robotic follower and verified its effectiveness by an evaluation test which is implemented to certain number of persons being tested.

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This paper describes a care robot for meal assistance with chopsticks function that enables the patient to eat various types of foods by oneself. This care robot has functions to hold and manipulate foods by chopsticks with the trajectory control and the grasping force control. Here the functions to cutting and the function to mixing are shown.

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To support disabled persons with less muscle strength like muscular dystrophy patients, a single switch and a scanning menu panel is introduced to input method for the manipulator control. The iArm manipulator and its simulator are connected to evaluate the input performance. The evaluation task is the handling of pegs on the pegboard with the manipulator. Two muscle dystrophy patients tested our interface to control both of the simulator and the real manipulator.

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Personal computers have much information with characters or pictures for their use. Therefore, it is difficult for visually impaired persons or elderly people to use PCs depending on visual sensation. Various human interfaces were developed for PC operation supporting against this problem. However, these have not become widely used yet. In this study, we aim to develop a force display touchpad for supporting PC use. This report describes its prototyping.

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The purpose of this research is to develop hi-speed and hi-accuracy machining system which is corresponded to 1 micron of accuracy. The servo data is the set of position command at every servo cycle time, which is minimum unit of position command in NC machining processes. The servo data is directly generated by geometric model interpolation process without NC program. In geometric model interpolation process, line, arc and spline curve are used as the geometric elements to generate servo data. Then motion errors are simulated and compensated to servo data. These methods are implemented and compared feed rate and accuracy with current system. As a result, it is evident that proposed system is able to control the tool machine with high accuracy.

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In recent years, various boards such as glass substrate and semiconductor wafers have become larger. Therefore, fracture of substrates under conventional contact transportation is unavoidable. In order to solve these problems, a new non-contact transportation technology is proposed. The board is levitated by aerostatic force and held by the holding unit constructed by oscillating plate actuated by bolted Langevin transducer. In this paper, noncontact holding force was measured. The holding force is varied with overlap area between substrate and oscillating plate. As the holding units hold the substrate, the units are traveled along the transportation road. As a result, the substrate moves without any contact.

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Conventional methods of online robot teaching have difficulity for the teaching operator to detect accurate positional errors between the hand and a workpiece. For the purpose of developing practical supports for online robot teaching, this study investigates information requirements of the operator's work and then discusses their effective visualization of data from a camera and a force sensor attached to the robot's wrist. Hierarchical Task Analysis is applied to the operator's task in defining positions and postures of the hand against actual workpieces, to extract specific pieces of information or relationship that should be incorporated into the visual assistance. Considering these information requirements, we propose a GUI to visualize the force information in order to find accurate motion points effectively. The proposed GUI can help the operators to figure out motion points more precisely, and can reduce the amount of time for robot teaching.

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An industrial automatic guided vehicle using line trace control is currently under development in our laboratory. The vehicle is designed to have general versatility and practicality in industrial applications. For the sake of simplification, the line sensing part of the control system is made to include only two magnetic sensors that recognize the distance to a magnetic sheet. In addition, the vehicle is simply driven by two drive wheels. This paper presents the development concept, the control system and experiment using prototype.

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The purpose of this research is to develop hi-speed and hi-accuracy machining system. The servo data is the set of position command at every servo cycle time, which is minimum unit of position command in NC machining processes. The servo data is directly generated by geometric model interpolation without NC program. In this research the tool path generation system that is able to predict and compensate the tool deflection and fluctuation of cutting load is proposed. This report refers to the algorithm to calculate the removal volume in consideration of a tool deflection.

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To automate bead grinding tasks by industrial robots, compliant motion of a grinding tool is necessary. However, almost industrial robots are designed on the basis of position control schemes and are not appropriate for force control tasks. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposes an active tool holder which adjusts the tool position independently of robot motion. The developed active tool holder consists of a brushless DC motor, a ball screw and a parallel links mechanism. The translational motion of the grinding tool is realized by the compact mechanism. A simple stiffness controller using force sensor was designed and implemented in the active tool holder to achieve compliant motion of the tool. The developed system was applied to a simple bead grinding task. Experimental results show that the system enables the smooth bead grinding tasks using industrial robots.

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The independent control is one of the useful ways to build a servo controller in the industrial field. However, that has problem not to synchronize another servo controller. Therefore, accurate synchronous control based on H_2 control theory with pole restriction is proposed, and effectiveness of this theory is verified by comparing the independent controller with the synchronous controller in this paper. As a result, when disturbance is applied, the synchronous controller is better than the independent controller, although the independent controller is better than the synchronous controller from view point of state characteristics.

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Metal spinning is a plastic forming process that forms sheet or tube metal fixed to a rotating mandrel by forcing roller tools. Products formed by metal spinning have been inherently limited to straight-axis and circular-sectional shapes. In this study, we succeeded to make curved-axis and non-axisymmetric shells by synchronizing the roller motion in the axial and radial direction with the rotation of the spindle axis, and without using forming dies. A numerically-controlled spinning machine moves the spherical head tool along the trajectory which is calculated from the desired shape considering contact with the tool. Curved-axis cones of various bending angles up to 60 deg. are experimentally formed from aluminum sheet.

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It is generally thought that we must give some rules to robot to learn imitational behaviors, such as coordinate transformation. But this study shows that a robot can perform imitational behavior by combination of action primitives. Our robot experiment suggests that with following three requirement robot can generate imitational behavior: (1) The robot has ability to segment behaviors and combine action primitives. To achieve this, we used Multiple Time-scale Recurrent Neural Network (MTRNN) as a controller of robot and statistical machine learning methods to learn own and other's behaviors; (2) The robot has experienced all action primitives needed for generation of imitational behavior, through learning of behaviors which are combination of the primitives; (3) And the self-other correspondence of behaviors are given. We used so-called "bind" learning methods to give robot the correspondence. Furthermore, analysis of the MTRNN shows that slow time scale neural units represent combination of the primitives, not the behavior directly.

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We have proposed an applicatoin of the mimesis model to infer other's sensor patterns, which are unobservable. In this propoesed method, however, there was an assumption that the protocol to covert the sensor patterns into a symbol index was fixed, and given by the designer. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a method to infer the strategy of conversion protocol taken by the other, for the sake of estimation of other's sensor patterns. We infer other's strategy by reducing into a search problem with questionnaires consisted of motion patterns and a query line. Then, we evaluated the estimation of the sensor patters of the other, taking the other's strategy into account.

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Human muscular-skeleton structure is supposed to play an important role for realizing dynamic locomotion such as jumping and running. This paper investigates the effect of humanlike morphology for dynamic bouncing. We use a monopod that has biomimetic muscular-skeleton structure including biarticular muscles and confirm that biarticular muscles strongly governed the posture through bouncing. Experimental results show that restraint between joints by biarticular muscles made coupled movement of whole lower leg and contributed to realization of stable bouncing. Also, asymmetric human muscular-skeleton structure is founded a beneficial effect of directional control of bouncing.

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In this paper, a mono vision based robot system is suggested for automatic electrophoretic deposition (EPD). The system consists of the 2 DOF rectangular robot and the monitoring system. The rectangular robot is designed to move at the very low speed up to 10mm/s using screws for improving the quality of the EPD process. For automatic EPD process, the position control of the robot is carried out by visual feedback using only one camera, where color marks are attached to the robot end effector and the beakers. Thanks to the camera, the robot can be controlled without accumulated position error. For verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of the suggested robot system, the experiment is carried out for the automatic EPD process with three kinds of suspensions.

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This paper addresses the development of an appearance inspection system of a metallic spindle with a robotic pan/tilt device. The inspection of the metallic spindle is carried out by using a CCD camera mounted on the robotic pan/tilt device which can not only enlarge the inspection area, but it can also retain a considerable resolution to detect micro defects on the surface of the metallic spindle. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system, inspection experiments are carried out. The experimental results show that the proposed inspection scheme can detect the defects effectively using the proposed system.

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This paper describes the design and implementation of distributed cooperative control of industrial robot systems using Petri net modeling. For robotic task specification, the work at the manufacturing cell is divided into several unit operations, and the partial order relation of unit operations, such as synchronized operation, parallel operation and so on, is described based on common Petri net technique. The Petri net function is enhanced so that it may not move the tokens until the operation, shown by each place, is finished, even if the marking satisfies the ignition condition. Petri net based real-time distributed cooperative control of industrial robot systems using a Petri net simulator is implemented and experimental results show the effectiveness of the control scheme.

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In this paper, we propose an entirely new method which achieves higher speed of operation and highly accurate length measurement of products on a conveyor belt. This paper describes an analysis on a digital image taken by a digital camera. Our interest is directed to extract the exterior of a product and to process it into the available information depending on the heights of a camera and a product.

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This aim of research is to develop a protein crystallization states evaluation system utilizing image processing. In this paper, we describe about automated image evaluation software for protein crystallization state. This software consists of the processes that are target area detection from microscopic image, evaluation utilizing our previous proposed method and storing the result to the database. Designed software also introduced, a graphical User Interface (GUI) for supporting observations by the expert. The software is experimented utilizing the images which are taken by automated crystallizing system. The experimental results are discussed.

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A new orthogonal-type robot with compliant motion capability is presented for finishing metallic molds with small curved surface. The orthogonal-type robot consists of three single axis robots with a position resolution of lynm. A small ball-end abrasive tool is attached to the tip of z-axis of the robot. The control system of the orthogonal-type robot is composed of a force feedback loop, a position feedback loop and a position feedforward loop. The effectiveness of the orthogonal type robot is examined through an actual finishing test of a LED lens mold with a diameter of 4 mm.

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The natural frequency of sloshing can be estimated by using a multiple classification analysis as a representative statistical method. The data is treated by using several parameters which change with the tilting of a container, such as liquid level and diameter, et al. Moreover, the main factor which makes the natural frequency fluctuation is clarified by extracting required information from the obtained data by Principal Component Analysis. In order to suppress the sloshing, position feedback controller with a notch filter corresponding to the estimated natural frequency is designed. The effectiveness of the proposed system is shown through experiments using liquid container transfer.

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This paper discusses experimental verifications of a two-dimensional modular robot called "Slimebot", consisting of many identical modules, each of which has simple motile functions. We have so far investigated a fully decentralized algorithm able to control the morphology of the modular robot in realtime according to the environment encountered. One of the most significant features of our approach is that we explicitly exploit "emergent phenomena" stemming from the interplay between control and mechanical systems. In order to verify our proposed control scheme, we have constructed real physical Slimebot. Experiments with 10 modules suggest that this robot exhibits significant abilities, i.e., adaptivity, scalability, and fault tolerance without any global information.

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This paper proposes a robust motion control method for robots which has a redundantly actuated mechanism such as human muscle systems. The stability of the control method is mathematically proven. The effectiveness of the proposed control method is confirmed by some simulation results.

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In this research we model a cricket's neuronal system of the adaptive behavior selection mechanism. In our model, it assumes that the biogenic amine(Octopamin) and efficacy to sensory input from an antenae to generate adaptive behavior. In this paper, we hypothesize that the internal state(Octopamine) regulates behavior transition probability in fighting behavior the computer simulations are done by using our model.

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Robot control system that consists of a feedback controller and reference motion pattern is widely used. High calculation cost is also required to design the control system. So far, we have developed a controller design method based on an orbit attractor of nonlinear dynamics. The controller is decomposed into motion and body elements, and a new controller can be easily obtained by the combination of these elements. However, in the decomposition stage of the controllers, "same motions" for several robots have to be prepared a priori. Because it is not easy for us to define which motions are identical for a number of robots with different dynamical characteristics, a heuristic way is employed and the appropriate controller is not obtained sometimes. In this paper, we propose a verifying method of identifying various motions. This method is based on the vector field in the state-space, and makes use of the motion elements. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by simulations using tapping dance robots.

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Humans are the only living things which make a erect bipedalism. We are evolving the lower extremity - below a pelvis and gained the more complicated and more sophisticated gait pattern. In this report, we separate Ground Reaction Force (GRF) from the foot shape and the ankle joint torque for gait. And we clarified that the effect of those.

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The potential method is one of the methods of path planning for mobile robot in unknown area. In this potential method, the area which takes the potential of an obstacle into consideration is called Interference Area, and it is very important to select a threshold value. This time, we focus on the form of Interference Area as a threshold value to select. By selecting the form of this Interference Area aims at Efficiency Improvement of path planning.

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Designing age-appropriate and safe playground equipment requires scientific data. However, data is scarce. To collect data useful in playground equipment design, a playground equipment, 'Noboreon,' was created. Noboreon equipped sensors by which children's behaviors were recorded while they were playing on it. The paper describes data recording and collecting procedures using Noboreon and modeling process with data collected.

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The spherical area where sound pressure is high on a partial target made by the speaker array is called sound spot. It was generable in the fixed arbitrary positions until now, using 128ch plane speaker array two or more sets. However, it also needs to move in the situation where people move. In this research, from the picture group obtained using multiple cameras, the information on the 3D position of a target person's head is acquired, and sound spot was generated in the head position. By this method, it aims at moving sound spot according to a target person.

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The reproduction technology of accident situation is indispensable identify hazards, investigate causes, and develop preventive measures for serious child injuries. This paper proposes a method for estimating accident situation by integrating the bodygraphic injury surveillance system and a fall simulator. The proposed method allows us to to estimate possible accident situations, search the most likely accident situation by evaluating the similarity between simulation data and injury case data, and conduct the worst case analysis. This paper also reports an example of the application of the proposed method to reproducing an actually occurred accident case of play equipment.

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This paper describes a laser-based people tracker with two-layered laser range sensor. The upper-layered laser is scanned at waist height of people, and the lower-layered laser is done at knee height. A heuristic-rule based detection and the global-nearest-neighbor based data association find walking and running people from the laser images in crowded environments. Their people are tracked via the interacting-multiple-model estimator. Simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness of our method.

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To realise safety autonomous navigation, it is necessary to detect obstacles in sweeping region of a robot. This paper describes observation motion planning algorithm for obstacle detection using Laser Range Finder with one servo motor. The motion planning algorithm finds sequence of observing unobserved points to achieve faster safety speed of the robot. In this paper, unmeasured points update process and observation plannning are described.

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This paper presents a new method to determine likelihood distribution in localization with scan matching. In our approach, the likelihood distribution is represented as gaussian distribution. The proposed method utilizes tangent directions of scan points in order to determine the gaussian parameters. This method is capable of evaluating geometric features with scan points. Advantages of this method are determining appropriate likelihood distribution for geometric features, and low calculation cost.

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We have developed a human-machine interface for object manipulation by a multi-fingered robotic hand. The information needed for manipulation is various kinds of information such as the desired pose of a manipulated object, contact points and so forth. It is very troublesome for a user to input this information, so we have developed a teaching-by-showing system to obtain this information by measuring the human hand and its surroundings using an omni-directional camera. A user holds or moves the camera as an input device in order to input the desired pose of the manipulated object. The pose is calculated by matching features extracted from images taken by the camera. The hand is in contact with cylindrical surface of the camera, so that the desired contact points are also inputted by processing hand images taken by the camera.

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We have proposed a stereo camera system "subtraction stereo" that focuses on moving regions. This paper proposes a method to track multiple persons using a sequence of range images obtained by subtraction stereo. Tracking that is robust to occlusion, etc. is realized using Kalman filter. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments.

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This paper describes a method of fault diagnosis of dead reckoning and external sensor (laser range sensor, LRS) for mobile robot. Each robot in cooperation detects the fault of in-vehicle senors by comparing the velocity estimates with its own two velocity providers: dead reckoning and laser based scan matcher. When the robot detects the sensor fault, it exchanges the LRS data with the other robots, and the robots estimate their positions with laser based scan matcher and in-vehicle passive beacon (reflector). Comparison of the position estimates allows identifying which sensor fails. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our method.

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This paper describes river-bank management method using a Mobile Mapping System (MMS) and a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). As the class A river-bank's traditional management method is differential leveling at management cross section, it is difficult to obtain continuous longitudinal profile or arbitrary cross section. Proposed method using the MMS and the UAV can acquire continuous 3D shapes of the river-bank. In this paper, MMS and small UAV is introduced, and the comparison between traditional measurement result and the MMS measurement result and the small UAV measurement result is introduced. The field test in Edogawa river-bank proves the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.

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This paper discusses a high-speed range image sensor which can obtain textured range images in real time. One of the important applications of this system is an outside sensing for mobile robots. The proposed system consists of a commercially available laser projector and two CCD cameras. The number of pixels of a range image is 361 and the measurement range is 800-2000mm. Experimental results show 40Hz sensing of textured range images. The effectiveness of the proposed system is verified by experiments. As a major conclusion, the constructed sensing system obtains real-time textured range images with commercially available devices.

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This paper presents a method for measuring 3D environment by a tracked vehicle using a laser range finder (LRF) with an arm-type liftable unit. The LRF is installed at the end of the arm. The unit enables the sensor to change position and to face at a right angle to a variety of configuration. Therefore, the sensing system can measure a 3D configuration such as an upward or downward slope more accurately than conventional 3D sensing system with the LRF, which have generally used a rotating mechanism. In addition, this system can uniform scanning density and avoid the problem on accumulation point in conventional system. In this study, we have designed and fabricated a prototype system of the liftable LRF unit and mounted it on a tracked vehicle with two crawlers that we have developed. The basic 3D sensing in this system was confirmed from two primal experiments for measuring simple environment and stair configuration.

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This paper reports real-time virtual haptization of, for example, a remote object surface based on highspeed 3-D shape measurement. With this system, the operator feels sense of touch as if following the object surface. We use a high-speed projector-camera system to realize real-time measurement, and a haptic device called PHAMToM to render virtual haptization. A dynamically changeable structured light is projected so that the projected slit ray intersects with a virtual touching point, which is determined by the stylus position of the haptic device. A camera image of this scene gives the positional relationship between the object surface and the virtual touching point. We use this relationship to generate force feedback such that the virtual touching point is piished back to the object surface.

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When generate three-dimensional map by move the Laser Range Sensor, it is necessary to accurately position of the sensor. In this study, we propose a method to automatically seek the position of the optical center of the sensor, by simultaneous measurement of multiple panels.

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This paper presents a laser-based moving-object tracking by two mobile robots. Each robot finds moving objects from its own laser scan image based on an occupancy grid based method. Two robots exchange the information of the detected moving objects and their laser images with each other via a broadcast communication system, and they track the moving objects cooperatively. The tracking algorithm is based on Scan matching, Kalman filter and Covariance Intersection. The experimental result of two walking people validates the proposed method.

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The range of the measurement is generally moved with the servo etc. when LRF etc. only of the line measurement are used. So, it is necessary to control the servo for the changeability type of the measurement range. Then, we developed the mechanism to which the range of the measurement was simply changed only with a cheap DC motor.

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We aim at development of a small-size 3-D laser scanner for high-speed and dense shape measurement. We had developed TK scanner that can measure wide and dense 3-D shapes in our previous works. It takes from 10s to 20s for the measurement of dense 3-D shape. We would like to reduce the measurement time. In this paper, we explain our developed a new 3-D scanner named HD scanner (High-speed and Dense 3-D scanner). For speed-up, a high speed 2-D laser range finder (LRF) was developed by HOKUYO Co., and a new pan-tilt mechanical base was developed by Harmonic Drive System. HD scanner can measure a 3-D shape 6 times as fast as TK scanner. Using HD scanner, a wide view angle and dense 3-D shape can be measured within 1 sec.

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We aim at development of a real world search engine using robot technologies and information science. This task includes a lot of research topics. In this paper, we would like to explain about a method of area detection for unknown objects using the fixed sensors. The sensor fixed in the environment consists of a wide view angle camera and a 3-D laser scanner. We detect areas where are unknown objects from 3-D shapes and all round view images.

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For constructing a geometric and photometric model of a large-scale cultural heritage using a laser range finder and a digital camera, a number of measurements must be performed at various viewpoints. However, in general, obtained range images must be aligned into standard coordinates by applying registration algorithms such as ICP. To shorten the processing time and simplify the geometric modeling, we have developed a laser measuring system using multiple robots and the precise positioning system named Cooperative Positioning System or CPS. Additionally, as a simple photometric modeling, we proposed a method to align texture images accurately onto a geometric model using range data. This paper presents the measurement experiments in "Dazaifu Tenmangu" shrine which is a national important cultural property of Japan by the proposed system consisting of three mobile robots.

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