Most of cleaning robots have a disk like body with a diameter of about 300mm and a height of 100mm. However, there are gaps in which robots cannot go ahead in real environments due to the robot's size. In addition, it is impossible to clean up a floor in a neighborhood of obstacles and corners that are easily covered with dust garbage. The objective of this study is to develop a small cleaning robot so as to realize cleaning at gaps in which a conventional robot cannot come in, neighborhoods of obstacles, and corners. The present paper describes a realization method for running along obstacles and gives some experimental results to evaluate the running performance.

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An autonomous cleaning robot is proposed so as to move on all floors including stairs in a building. In human living environments, it is often the case that the cleaning area is three-dimensional space such as a high-rise building. However, many of cleaning robots cannot clean and move on stairs, because they are not considered to move on places between floors. The proposed cleaning robot is attached L-shaped legs on the both sides of the body frame of a rectangular solid. The robot climbs down stairs by rotating the body so that the top and bottom sides of it may be reversed with using L-shaped legs. In this paper, a mobile mechanism and a control method are described for climbing down and translational movement on stairs.

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Cleaning of glass windows for buildings is a dangerous work for human. Automatic cleaning for glass windows has been, thus, expected. Small-sized window cleaning robots have been proposed. For reliable tasks of the purpose, the robots should follow a desired path accurately. So we have proposed a path tracking control for the window cleaning robot. Therefore the robot can clean efficiently. However, it is uncertain that the window is actually clean. In this paper, a dirt sensor for the window cleaning robot is proposed to improve reliability of cleaning. The sensor has a light emitting section and a light receiving section. It detects dirt by measuring amount of reflected light which increases in dirty place. Furthermore, a method using the dirt sensor loaded onto the robot to improve quality of window cleaning is proposed. The experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed method.

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The paper describes practical design and use of a Cleaning Robot for Vessel. We developed an autonomous Cleaning Robot, which is equipped with a gyroscope sensor, a triangular surveying sensor, and a communication device. The robot uses the gyroscope sensor and odometery to calculate its current position. The triangular surveying sensor, together with reflection panels strategically placed in the environment, is used for calibrating and improving the accuracy of the calculated position.

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We develop the system of Semi-Autonomous Remote Power Distribution Task Robot which executes a task with task level when we ordered. The system is multi agent system which constructs 7 agents and 3 databases. The robot executes to read a work sequence is written by task level. Approach method is to measure 3 dimension position of work object by a camera.

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Magnetically levitated robots can move without lubrication, they generally have advantages to the use in the various special environments such as in a dust-free room, in a vacuum, in a flammable atmosphere, and in vivo. Meanwhile, they have a disadvantage of small working volume corresponding to the allowable air gap between the levitated object and the manipulator (electromagnets). In some cases, to construct a combination of a magnetically levitated robot and an industrial robot which has a comparatively large working volume seems an effective way to expand the whole working volume. On that premise, we are developing an experimental system for collaborative work between a magnetically levitated robot and an industrial robot. This paper presents the concept and the configuration of the experimental system, and the result of a preliminary experiment which has been performed to evaluate mainly three elements: the two robot numerical models and the remote manipulation element.

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There is serious problem of aging of the craftsmen who have tie-dyeing technique. In substitution for a "tying" process by thread in tie-dyeing, we have proposed the usage of elastic caps. A cloth is pushed into the cap by a needle attached on the robot hand. In this report, to improve the work efficiency a cap cartridge and a sub robot were examined. It was confirmed that the high efficiency of the work was achieved and an increase in the speed of robot was also effective.

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The final goal of this study is to develop a robotic system that can precisely polish metal molds instead of skilled persons. We have been trying to build such a system using an industrial robot with six joints, and soft and ceramic whetstones to polish metal molds. In this paper, we build a machine that can polish under constant polishing pressure condition. Then, we conducted an experiment to uncover relationships between the number of polishing and surface roughness. As a result, we found out that surface roughness was almost same when the number of polishing varied. However, the standard deviation of the surface roughness varies according to the number of polishing. Also we attached a six axes force sensor to an industrial robot to measure forces during polishing.

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In this research, we develop a system to arrange books in bookshelfs by a mobile manipulator with a gripper, a camera and a laser range finder. The robot recognizes the positions of books which is pasted markers with barcodes by using template matching and triangulation, and knows the book's IDs by reading the barcodes. If a book which is not on the fixed position, this robot takes out the book from the bookshelf and inserts the book into the fixed position. If there is no space to insert a book, the robot can also make the space by moving the book which is on the inserted position to the right.

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Impact acoustic approach is an effective method for inspecting the degradation diagnosis of the concrete surface. This paper presents a novel mobile robot for the impact acoustic inspection with its design and the impact motion mechanism. The features of the proposed mobile robot include impact motion without an additional motor not to obstruct the locomotion of the mobile robot, and the robust degradation analysis of the concrete surface in the noisy environment. In order to confirm the validity of the proposed robot, the experiments of the impact acoustic inspection by using the proposed robot is performed on a real concrete surface with floating damage.

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To obtain a secured mating of electric connectors is one of the most important steps in a robotic wiring harness assembly system. Although there are plentiful results about complex peg-in-hole assembly problems, little work has been done with respect to this special issue. In many cases, mating connectors can be regarded as a hole search process of a multiple hole-in-peg problem. Because various faults might occur during the search, a reliable error recovery strategy is necessary in the mating task. In the paper, the error detection algorithm and the error recovery algorithm for various connectors are mainly realized by using force/torque sensor. The experiment results show the proposed system can detect and diagnose the position errors, and realize error recovery and mating successfully. It shows the fault-tolerable capability of the system is improved evidently.

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In this paper, we improved our method of robot programming with view-based approach: view-based teaching playback. It was developed to achieve more robustness to changes of task conditions, such as variations in initial positions of the object, than conventional teaching playback. We applied this view-based teaching playback to pushing tasks by an industrial robot. After multiple teaching demonstrations, pushing an object to the goal position was successfully achieved from some initial positions that were not identical to those in the demonstrations, without object models or camera calibrations.

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In this research, we consider the development of device for handling small parts. We developed the robust and agile pickup device (RAPiD) in first report, and proposed designing method for the tip of RAPiD in second report. In this article, we develop a designing method for the tips of the handling device to perform gear assembly. In addition, we design the several types of tips for handling and assembling gears, and conduct experiments of gear assembly.

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We have proposed a concept for picking up small circular parts such as ball bearings, washers, and gears. In this concept, the handling device called RAPiD (Robust and Agile Pick-up Device) cages an object without letting the object escape from its tips before closing them completely and then robustly grasps the object at a unique position based on the self-alignment concept. In this article, we attach the RAPiDs to dual manipulators and Each RAPiD grasps the gear and gear unit with axes, respectively. And then, they perform the gear assembly tasks at an appropriate position determined by considering the conflict between the manipulator and gear unit with several axes and the range of movement and the singular configuration of dual manipulators.

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Capability to manipulate small objects is an important requirement in designing assembly robot. Majority of related studies use one or dual arm robot with gripper or fingered hands for their end effectors. The manipulated objects are usually from common household and not suitable to attend smaller size of object. Therefore, we proposed our robot that consists of a seven-link dual-arm manipulators and three-fingered hands for cooperative tasks involving small objects. As an initial work, we calculate the 6-DOF posture of featureless, small and unobvious color of a hexagonal M10 nut (diameter, 19.6mm). We propose a technique called Confirm-Estimate-Rotate (CER) that employs image processing techniques to integrate with the robot algorithm for a grasping task. Real-time experiment results proved the capability of our method for the manipulation on small objects. It successfully made the multi-link robot change its posture safely to match the target posture in unstructured conditions.

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This paper propose the calibration technique that is needed when the manipulator is installed. In our laboratory, we showed the calibration technique that is a relative position of arm and work calibrated by touching the probe installed in the point of the arm to the working work. In my study propose the calibration technique that installed the laser range finder in the point of the arm, and measuring a relative position of work and arm without touching the arm with work. It is thought that precise work can be done by doing my calibration technique, because doing calibration by noncontact it becomes shortening the time of calibration and doing calibration to working work not only installation but also working.

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In this paper, robustness condition for robot trajectory against environmental variation and effectiveness of direct teaching are discussed based on the parameter space expression, through a case study on a peg-in-hole task. In the peg-in-hole experiment, hole position is artificially varied and robustness of two different assembly strategies are compared based on the degree of achievement and success rate. One strategy is generated by direct teaching and is similar to that human usually adopts, while the other is generated by programming, which is similar to conventional methods such as using teaching pendant. Experimental results show that the human-like trajectory is more robust against variation of position where appropriate manipulator compliance effectively absorbs errors. This indicates the effectiveness of direct teaching because such human-like trajectory is difficult to be taught through conventional methods.

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This paper presents Inverse Kinematics algorithms using Nonlinear Least-squares Method for Redundant manipulator. Newton-Raphson method (NR) is a common method to calculate Inverse Kinematics. However, numerical solution using NR method produces problems on singularity and solvability. If numerical solution using NR becomes unstable, robot could be out of control. Hence, it requires tedious check on the stability, prior to the robot operation. Therefore, this paper proposes a robust numerical solution using Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) method. The method has strong stability against the singularity and solvability. In addition, Weighted Least-Norm method (WLN) is used to keep the solution inside the movable range of the robot. Finally, we confirm the validity of the proposed method through the simulation results.

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This paper describes the design and implementation of control software for industrial robotic systems based on concurrent process modeling. A robotic task is graphically specified using Petri nets representing the flow of subtasks and workpieces. Real time multitask control of robots and machines is performed with external gate arcs controlling transition firing such that the dynamic behavior of the real robotic system is in accordance with that of the discrete event model. Implementation using multithreaded programming is described and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

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This paper describes about a control scheme that enables industrial robots to grasp moving objects. In the developed control system, the target position is measured at a constant frequency by processing images acquired from two cameras. To consider the delay of image acquisition and robot motion, the move destination of the target object is predicted by using the state of movement estimated based on the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Results of the experiment that estimates the state of movement of a pendulum target are provided in order to validate the developed system to predict the move destination, and to detect the sudden change of target motion that affects the final accuracy of grasping.

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In multi-axis machine tools, each drive system is generally controlled to suppress the tracking error along the drive axis. For precision machining, contouring error of workpiece should be considered in controller design. The contouring error is defined as a normal error component to workpiece surface. Because it is difficult to calculate actual contouring error in real time, we use the approximated a contouring error obtained by coordinate transformation. In this paper, we propose a method of using the contouring control for energy saving of machine tools by modifying the reference to improve the approximation of contouring error. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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This paper proposes the position control of table drive systems by predictive functional control with disturbance observer. In this study, disturbance observer is utilized to reduce the predicted output error in the PFC algorithm. The proposed control scheme is implemented in table drive systems and its effectiveness is assessed by experiment.

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This paper presents decentralized fault diagnosis strategy of event-driven systems based on probabilistic inference together with a method to construct the structure of the inference network, Bayesian network (BN). The structure of BN is essential since the computational burden and the fault diagnosis performance greatly depend on it. In this paper, we particularly focus on a construction methodology of BN structure based on evaluation of the arcs via Kullback-Leibler divergence of the conditional probabilities.

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This paper presents modeling of liquid upward flow and design of pressing velocity considering air entrainment suppression in press casting process. In this study, the problem of air entrainment is focused on an innovative casting method called "Same Mold Press Casting". This method has two molds which are an upper mold and a lower mold, molten metal is directly poured into the lower mold without a runner, and then pressed to fill the cavity by the upper mold being lowered down. Thus, fluid of molten metal which was turbulent by moving upper mold has air entrainment. Then, air entrainment are suppressed by modeling of liquid upward flow has been clarified.

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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. In order to realize the compliant motion, a stiffness control system using non-linear force feedback was designed. The system can change the stiffness of the tool holder according to its position and enables the effective bead grinding task. The developed system was applied to a simple bead grinding task to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Metal spinning is a plastic forming process which is suited for diverse-types-and-small quantity production. In the process, products are formed into shape of a mandrel pressing a tool against a metal blank. However, product shapes by metal spinning have been inherently limited to axially symmetric shapes. In this study, a conventional metal spinning method for non-axisymmetric shapes is developed. To calculate the tool path easily, it uses the measurement of the mandrel shape and linear interpolation between the blank shape and the mandrel shape. In our forming experiment, rectangular box shape was made from a thin aluminum sheet.

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Metal spinning for pipe necking generally takes long production time since the target shape is gradually formed through many tool paths. Metal spinning machines with two roller tools are widely used for pipe spinning in order to balance the forming force of each roller. The two rollers are usually controlled symmetrically. In this study, we investigate a method to cooperatively control the two rollers. We aim to increase the radial feed and reduce the forming time by moving the two rollers asymmetrically. In the experiments, circular pipes are formed into smaller diameter under various conditions, and the forming results of symmetric and asymmetric movement are compared.

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Stepping motor has been widely used for both the factory automation (FA) and the office automation (OA), because it is able to achieve high-accuracy positioning by open loop control. This paper studies on the suppression control of residual vibration for the feeding part of chip taping machine. Since the load is inhomogeneously changed at the feeding part, it is difficult to derive the optimum pulse timing for suppressing the residual vibration into the allowed constant range. Therefore, in this paper, a system that can perform high-speed movement and high-accuracy positioning is proposed, even the load changes inhomogeneously when the stepping motor is drove intermittence. By designing optimum pulses that can stabilize into the reference position after performing an overshot or undershoot, we achieved the fine positioning without vibration and steady error.

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We research the hydraulic pressure manipulator as part of development of the energy conservation mechatronics. This time, We propose method of long overlap for decrease leakage that cause loss of energy. In addition, we introduces the performance.

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This paper shows the result of calculating the optimality of the installation of the solar panel for the simple non-condensing type photovoltaic generation system. And we consider the way to apply this result to mechatronics.

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We proposed the linear engine generator system. Moreover, we modeled the system components, and we searched simple characteristic by simulation. This paper shows the simple characteristic of the linear engine generator system.

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This research aims at the efficiency improvement of engine generator by energy conservation control of internal combustion engine. We developed simulator of crank type engine that can position control and velocity control etc.

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We have developed a small fuel cell vehicle with 1kW fuel cell (micro FCV). This paper presents the design of lightweight braking system and the hydrogenous piping system, and the experiments of the electricity generation by the fuel cell. The structure analysis were conducted, and the analysis results showed enough safety factors. The experimental results showed that the electricity generation characteristics of the fuel cell depended on the ambience temperature.

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We have developed a small fuel cell vehicle with 1kW fuel cell. This paper presents the measurement and control system and the purging effects. The measurement and control system includes the functions of the thermometer, die hygrometer, the speed meter, the purge controller and the voltage and current sensor.

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We have developed a single person operated small electric vehicle with 1kW fuel cell (micro FCV). The running tests and simulations of the developed micro FCV was conducted. The experimental results showed that the maximum speed was 21km/h with approximately 800W by fuel cell. The Simulation results showed the cruising distance was 37.0km and running duration was 148min at 15km/h. The system improvements to achieve the higher speed will be addressed in future research.

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Recently, automated systems that can work with limited energy have been desired in the area of agriculture. The underwater robots are especially expected because the water places are ubiquitous in the working area. In this study, we develop an underwater robot with solar batteries. Moreover, the robot has the ability of light following for electric power generation. The experiments in a water pool were demonstrated to evaluate the performances and we confirmed an effectiveness of the ability under conditions of variant light quantities.

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Since giant magnetostriction was first found at a room temperature in early 1980s, there have been many applications proposed. This paper introduces a novel application which is able to generate electric power by utilizing a reverse transduction of the material called Villari effect. The generator uses vibration as a power source which is commonly available in our daily life such as traffic-induced ground vibration or bridge vibration. We designed and fabricated a prototype of the generator. This report presents basic characteristics of the prototype and shows potential in practical use.

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In this research, we design firmware database for the firmware update to apply RTC-CANopen. This is a part of the firmware update-function of the device used in the RTC-CANopen system. These systems update application automatically without user action at the firmware update for CANopen devices. In this paper, we were to design of the Firmware database and to how to get to FW. In addition, we have designed in the system How to check FW data. Using the prototype system was evaluated in a validation based on experiments performed.

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In this research, we aim to make the RTC-CANopen reference public. The reference is consist of the robot hardware as well as RTC-CANopen software construction. This robot is designed to have simple structure so that the user can easily understand hardware implementation process. We also described a manual for RTC-CANopen to construct RTC-CANopen environment and application to creare sample mobile robot system.

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In this paper, we present the basic design of our mobile robot. Then we show our model based system implementation with RT-Middleware. We adopt model-based design to make robot models independent from specific hardware and software platform so that other developers will be able to refer our models and customize it to meet their robot specification.

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In this paper, we discuss an obstacle avoidance algorism with potential method considering robot shape. We are developing RT component for obstacle avoidance of autonomous mobile robot. Specially, we deal with avoidance algorithm for Omni-directional mobile robot. For autonomous robot pass the narrow route, not only position, but also direction of path should be generated according to configuration of environment. To solve this problem, we proposed a potential method with translate and rotary motion. In our method, repulsive force is applied to circumference of robot. Therefore, the force is not only applied to the center of gravity of robot. Then, the robot generates rotary motion for avoiding obstacle. By such method, translate and rotate path is generated according to reference model. We introduce a method and confirm its effectiveness by experiments.

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We developed a cleaning robot and installed office buildings and airport. We try to improve quality of software, and down cost of cleaning robot. So, we are developing Intelligent RT Software in changing the developed software to RTM system. After changing software, we mount the software robot, and verify at the real site -office building, airport-. In this text, we describe outlines of Intelligent RT Software Project, our result and view.

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The objective of this paper is to apply a 3D range finder to map generation. In map generation, we calculate the distance to the nearest object in each direction and integrate such distance data temporarily into a probabilistic occupancy map. Using 3D range finders is shown to be more suitable for complex environments than using 2D range finders. In addition, by implementing the method as an RT-component, which runs on RT-middleware, we achieved the complete compatibility with an existing RTC using a 2D range finder.

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In our study, our purpose is to make a service robot get a target in a unknown environment. the robot move its hand to target position while groping with impedance control. As a result, exessive force is prevented being caused in the robot and the environment when the hand touches a obstacle. If a obstacle is on the way the hand moving, the robot pushs it to hand's moving direction and expect the obstacle separate from the hand. But if it doesn't sepatate, the robot moves it out of the way and secure the migration pathway for moving the hand.

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In our study, our purpose is to make a service robot get a target in environment where obstacles exist. To approach for a target, it is necessary for a hand to evade obstacles. In this paper, we use binocular camera to get the distance between a hand and environment. And, we define a virtual reaction force from obstacles by using the distance. As a solution for evade obstacle, we apply virtual reaction force to imperdance control. We can move a hand according to the resultant force of gravitation from target and virtual reaction force from obstacle. Using image data as force, we have advantage that is possible to use past imperdance control system as it is.

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It is needed for humanoid robot to understand the place and the movement of itself and other objects on a real-time basis to cooperate with humans and other robots. In this paper, To realize that humanoid robot gets and follows the trajectory of moving objects during walking, we used humanoid with RTM-based visual processing board and RT-Components for real-time separation between self movement and moving objects.

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This paper describes design, specification and implementation issues of the motion planning and execution RT component we have been developing. We also report our experiment using a dual-arm robot HIRO-NX and the distributed system to realize vision-based manipulation tasks on the robot.

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This paper subscribes support functions for service robot application description for a task planning module. For the service robot on the real home or facilitate environment, there are many hardware and software modules. The work-planning module should connect the modules and handle many event from some of the modules. We make a work-planning module SDLEngine. It is combined with BeanShell that is an interpreter and support Java language syntax. SDLEngine supports RT middleware functions and extended Java language syntax. It provides interactive developing environment to describe applications for service robots.

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Recently, in order to develop reusable software, robot system developer build module based software on middleware platform. However each module build for each system, it is difficult to apply modules of other system to another system. Therefore we should consider the module design, when module based system are developed. In this paper, we introduce module design to build module based system. This design is based on Task-Skill-Servo model. The component of system classified into eight, these are Scenario, Task, Skill, Hardware Controller, RIMS (Robot Information Management Server), Data Analyzer and Sensor Controller. RIMS manage object position, robot status and global map. In order to plan to act, RIMS provide information of other part. And then, we actually implement one example system in RT middleware, which mobile robot do manipulation task using vision.

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Test-driven development (TDD) is one of software development practices. With this practice, tests are written prior to code implementation. One of advantages of TDD is to get automated regression test. By using automated regression test, it is possible to modify software functions safely and check software behavior easily in multi OS. We try to adopt TDD to RT-Component (RTC) development and develop the library "RT-Seam" that helps to test RTC easily.

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