The software architecture for tele-operated systems is required in remote location such as planetary surfaces. In this research, software architecture is proposed for development of tele-operated system. The proposed architecture modularizes each function as a software module because it makes advanced extendibility and flexible task management by connecting with a database via network. The database manages the modules in the architecture. There are problems such as lack of software cohesion in the proposed architecture. Therefore, purpose of this paper is to improve the proposed architecture to solve the problems. Moreover, simulations evaluate the feasibility and validity of a new architecture.

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In unknown enviromnent like disaster site, humanoids have to be able to handle tasks flexibly. We first propose the robot operating system for handling unknown object assisted with our shape recognition method. Secondory, we propose reusing handling information that humanoids have done with integration of two different recognition system.

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Recording manipulation tasks are very useful for teaching-by-demonstration and digital archiving of manipulation skills. In this paper, we propose a method for recording hand-object relationship during tasks using first-person RGB-D vision. First-person vision expands the recording area even though only one camera is used. Detection of changes from 3D information relieves complicated recognition by an RGB image. By detecting appearance/disappearance of an object under the region occluded by a hand, we estimate action of release/grasp and appearance of the target object. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through an experiment of a simple pick-and-place task.

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Recently, cleaning robots are becoming widely used. However, even if commercially-available cleaning robots can collect dust and small debris on the floor, they can not pick up trash such as PET bottles, cans, etc. We developed a cleaning robot intended for picking trash while dust collecting. This paper describes the architecture of the cleaning robot consisting of hardware such as an RGB-D sensor, a robot arm and a commercially-available cleaning robot, and also software for trash picking such as searching trash from RGB-D image, picking the trash via the robot arm and controlling the cleaning robot. We used commercially-available hardware and open source software such as Robot Operating System (ROS), Point Cloud Libraly (PCL) and so on.

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We proposed a method of unfolding a rectangular clothing by dual arm robot. Using the pinching and sliding motion, a robot has to recognize the shape pattern of the hem line. We classified the pattern into three groups: type (a), type (b) and type (c), and made an identification process using Laplacian filter. Using this system, we performed unfolding experiment and it was successful in 64 percent.

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This paper describes trajectory planning for a manipulator to grasp an object placed on a table. The more obstacles are on the table, the more calculation costs are needed to find a course for avoiding the obstacles. To overcome this problem, we use accumulated behavior data, which is a set of planning results that succeeded reaching task under various situation. One behavior data is composed of obstacles arrangement and manipulation trajectory. The manipulator acts on the information that is decided by comparing data arrangement and present arrangement. For evaluating this planning, we performed experiments in different conditions on a simulator.

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This report describes a head position estimation method for a variety of recumbent positions for a care robot. First, the robot detects a falling person using a laser range finder and moves there for getting a point cloud. The obtained point cloud is matched with those with head positions in the database using the ICP (iterative closest point) algorithm for estimating the current head position. Next, extracted head positions with matching scores above a threshold are clustered, and the center of the cluster with the highest accumulated scores is determined to he the head position. Finally, robot moves to the position near the estimated final head position and measures the carbon dioxide level to check if the person is breathing. We validated that the proposed system can detect the human vital sign for various recumbent positions.

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Research on life support systems by the robot technology include robotic room or ubiquitous home systems. Such a system uses many environmental sensors and controllers for recognizing human states and providing appropriate services. These equipments must be, however, installed in advance in a room. We therefore take another approach, in which we use a robot as a mobile sensor and controller. The robot autonomously wanders in the environment, measures physical states such as temperature, lighting, air at the very human position, and controls appliances or gives advice to them so that it "connects" house and resident to maintain a comfortable living environment.

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We aim to develop a home service robot which can take foods or drinks to users. The robot should be able to move to a refrigerator and open the door even if the actual refrigerator's pose is slightly different from the environmental map which has been created beforehand. In this paper, we focus on two functions of the robot: approaching the front of the refrigerator correctly and opening the door by pulling the door ' s handle. We propose a method of determining a goal pose of the robot according to an actual environment by recognition of a refrigerator ' s pose. This paper shows an implementation of these functions by cooperation of vehicle motion and hand-arm operation using ROS.

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Recently, there is growing interest on recording human motions from first-person perspective in a domestic environment. RGB-D cameras have been widely used in the field of robotics and also in analysis of egocentric vision, and such devices are still unproved. It is highly probable that the improvement of sensors will enhance the precision of previous systems. In this paper, we develop a wearable device using Kinect for Windows v2 in order to record hand motions during housework. We devote on reducing its weight by designing a novel casing, heat sink and head-mount. We evaluate the reliability of the system by measuring the time of continuous work without interruption.

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In recent years, the development of a partner robot to smooth the communication of people in a family or society is expected. We manufactured the autonomous mobile robot equipped the Kinect. And we constructed the robot control platform that saves conversation of each person while the autonomous mobile robot maps and patrols the position of people. Sharing the senser infomation obtained from Kinect by using network, and do speech recognition or face recognition. The recognition result was shared by using the ROS, and the robot provides the service to user. Here we report the experiment result of using that platform.

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This paper deals with a spherical rolling robot driven by a two-degree-of-freedom pendulum. A full dynamic model for this system is developed. Under the assumption that the contact path is specified and the sphere moves in pure rolling mode, the full dynamic model is reduced by imposing virtual constraints. Based on the reduced model, two motion planning algorithms, the differential-flatness-based one and the optimal-control-based one, are constructed. The feasibility of the algorithms is verified under simulation for a specific case, tracing circular curves in the plane.

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The interest for small robot arms which can work with human is increasing. When carrying an object, the geometric and dynamic models of these robot change. As a results, the robot control performance could be degraded and the risk of a collision with a surrounding might also occur. This research mainly explores the identification of these geometric and dynamic changes in the case when a robot carries a load. To do this, we first identify the load parameters using the data of ground reaction force and joint angles of the robot. We then identify the load shape using a data base composed by the PCA of the inertia matrix of different shapes and sizes. In our experiment, we identified the dynamic parameters and shape carried by a robot arm that has 5 DoF. we investigated the validity of our identification method.

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This paper describes the transport of a liquid container by a robot, due to the demand for the conveyance of molten metal in casting processes, for the tray service by robots, and so on. Since liquid in a container can wave greatly by changes of transport velocity due to the inertial force acting on its own, robots are not able to carry the container as a rigid box. Therefore, the transportation of one or more liquid containers using a robot requires a carrying method which prevents content fluid from being spilled from the container. The proposed method, the TGCW (Trajectory Generation to Control Wave) method, is a feed-forward control to realize the prevention of the spillover of content fluid. To reveal the performance of the TGCW method, we performed the verification by simulation using the Explicit-MPS (Moving Particle Simulation) method and by experiment.

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Flower stick juggling is a dexterous task done by skillful jugglers. We aim to realize dexterous tasks done by humans using robotic systems. This work focuses on flower stick juggling and proposes a feedback control strategy for a flower stick juggling task called "propeller" as one of the robotic dexterous manipulations. The propeller motion is modeled by considering combined flower stick and a robotic manipulator. We developed a control strategy that allows stable cyclic rotation of the flower stick in the air. Finally, the flower stick propeller motion is realized using an actual robotic system.

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Robotic tool use is one of the approaches for actualizing versatility of robots. There needs to be a controller design method of utilizing characteristic functions of a tool. In this paper, the authors selected a task of drawing a circle with a compass, which is a concrete example of utilizing constraint of contact. The authors designed a coordinate system for using a compass based on a principle. The coordinate system is composed of variables of keeping constraint and creating a circular orbit and variables of moving along the circular orbit. In addition, a method of separating each contact force partially when two point contact exists is proposed.

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The purpose of our research is to realize a robot not depending on only actuator power by effectively exploiting the dynamic properties of the robot. Humans can throw a fastball by exploiting interference force between links. In this paper, using a two-link planar robot, we propose a method to generate a robot motion pattern based on the free vibration theory for an explosive increase of the kinetic energy in the robot end-link.

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We propose a motion planning method for fast motion of path tracking task with constant hand speed using redundancy of manipulator. The propose method is method that has improved previous method. We previously proposed a motion planning method that performs path finding on a parameter space of redundancy instead of motion planning. The hand path was segmented to difficult sections that are difficult to track with fast hand speed and easy sections that are easy to track fast hand speed, and path-finding was performed different path-finding method on each section in previous method. However, the previous method has a problem because path-finding methods that perform on each sections are fixed. In this paper, we propose a motion planning method switching path-finding method depending on results of path-finding on each sections. The propose method is validated by simulation of 3-link planar redundant manipulator.

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This paper addresses velocity-level inverse kinematics based on the enhanced Singularity-Consistent (eSC) method, aiming at precise path following in the presence of kinematic singularities. In particular, we apply the eSC method to U-R-S type manipulators in order to achieve path tracking through stationary point singularities. In addition, we consider the singular region and propose two types of motion generation of path tracking at regular point singularities. One of them is according to the maximum joint velocities. The other is a method for controlling the dwelling time. The methods are based on a decomposition of a motion (singular direction or non-singular direction). The effectiveness of the proposed methods is illustrated via numerical simulations.

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This paper proposes an optimal path planning for unmanned ground vehicle considering kinematics and dynamics of a vehicle model. We set phase space including posture and velocity of the vehicle and use RASMO (Rapid Semi-Optimal Motion-Planning)kim2010 to generate search trees in four dimensional phase space. In this paper, we calculate transition cost based on not only running time but also simple cost map which represents road surface condition and we choose the path with the minimal cost by the search trees. It was verified that the proposed method can generate the path including complex movements like a cuff to avoid bad condition area.

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Control of multilegged robots requires usually complex system and many kinds of processing, because they have many DOF and are operated adaptively on complicated environment with sensors. In conventional robot control system, usually this processing had been implemented in one computer. However, considering the maintenance and scalability, it is not desirable to concentrate all processes on a huge single program. In this presentation, we introduce a general-purpose control system with hierarchical structure for multilegged robots. The control system consists of multiple computers connected via LAN. The detail of implemented system with a microcomputer and a PC and experimental results with one/four/six legged robot are shown.

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This paper reports a new shortcut method of the path planning for keeping clearance between the path and the obstacles. The bonding volumes which have the clearance to each robot link are generated and used for estimating the rough distance of the robot and the obstacles. The effectiveness of the method is verified in simulation.

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It is required to develop robots that can move in hazardous environments such as disaster site. Because of having a slim body and many joints, snake like robots have advantages when moving in these places. We focused in peristaltic motion for moving method in narrow place and developed a snake like robot that realized serpentine motion and peristaltic motion. Even when moving in narrow curves, by turning, the robot can continue to move. In this paper, we propose turning method to generate turning motion during peristaltic motion using active yaw joints.

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This paper describes application of a preview feedforward controller to Predictive Functional Control (PFC) systems. To improve the tracking performance of PFC, we use the Zero Phase Error Tracking Controller (ZPETC) that is a kind of feedforward controller. To attain the goal, we first derive the transfer function representation of the PFC controller, which is not explicitly demonstrated in the literature. Then, the closed-loop transfer function is computed using the transfer function representation, and ZPETC is designed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through an experimental evaluation using a table drive system.

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This paper addresses a path-tracking problem of robot manipulators with model predictive control (MPC) and disturbance observer (DOB). From the viewpoint of mechatronics, the speed of disturbance rejection in MPC is relatively slow. To overcome the disadvantage, DOB is recently introduced into MPC design. The designed DOB-based MPC scheme is applied to a position control system for two-link manipulator, and compared the DOB-MPC with DOB-normal MPC in experimental results.

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We compared real time obstacle avoidance algorithm which is using an approach sensor. We made Khatib's artificial potential approach and Kamoi's CPFS algorithm the comparative subject. We compared the collision number of times and arrival time based on each algorithm in the various operational environment. As a result, the potential approach generated a process at high speed by the simple operational society. On the other hand the CPFS algorithm could find a solution in an environment that a robot is surrounded. And also, an obstacle avoidance experiment was made by an experimental robot equipped with proximity sensors. As a result of the experiment, the same result was obtained mostly with a simulation experiment.

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A use of different tools expands categories of feasible operations of a robotic manipulator but cumbersome process arises for tool changes; positioning and adapting (or contacting) to tools. We proposed a scheme, which controls only the endpoint position of a six-joint manipulator for decreasing these control processes. We examined accomplishment of endpoint attitude adaptation to tools, and found that the scheme adapted the endpoint to tool surfaces without force sensing due to kinematic redundancy and joint backdrivability of a manipulator.

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There are a lot of patients with movement impairment who are paralyzed by brain stroke. Sufficient rehabilitative training is necessary for these patients. Rehabilitation support systems using force display devices are expected to quantify the effects of rehabilitative training and enhance the motivation of patients and rehabilitation effects. Development of Rehabilitation System for Upper and Lower Limbs PLEMO-HVD Using Horizontal and Vertical Displays is presented in this paper.

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In this paper, we analyzed gait motions with a prototype of a walking assist device "Raku-WALK", for evaluation of the device. The Raku-WALK is a three-wheeled walker which can be used in sitting position. Using 9-axis motion sensors, gait motions with the Raku-WALK along a straight path and a circular path were measured and analyzed, when the rear caster of the Raku-WALK is pivotable, or is not pivotable. From the results, when the rear caster is pivotable, rotational motions of the Baku-WALK and the waist, which were different from natural rotation of the waist during normal gait motion, were observed.

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This study proposes a novel step-climbing wheelchair based on lever propulsion control by human upper limb. The developed step-climbing wheelchair device consists of manual wheels with casters for moving around and a rotary-legs mechanism, which is capable of climbing up steps. The wheelchair also has a passive mechanism for postural transition to shift the center of gravity of the person between the desired positions for flat ground locomotion and step-climbing. In this paper, the development and assessment of the step-climbing wheelchair is described.

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This paper describes evaluating Variably Configured Wheelchairs (VCW) and automation of transformation control. As Japan becomes an aging society, the number of wheelchair users will also increase. Therefore, the safety and comfort of wheelchairs will become important increasingly. This research has been focusing on the escalator travel of wheelchair. An escalator is most effective means of moving between floors. If conventional wheelchairs could be used on an escalator, it would be most helpful for those who require them. Various VCW has been developed. So, it's evaluated which wheelchair is suitable most for escalator travel. Moreover, it aims at proposing and proving the way to control seat posture about the wheelchair applying trapezoidal link mechanism which can respond for escalator to go up and get down. In order to check the tracking, mechanical simulator step motion applied and it is moved successively. When the simulator of step motion is moving, the performance of VCW is measured. The experimental result shows that the proposed Variably Configured Wheelchair can adapt to the escalator motion adequately.

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Some children have handicaps to locomotive function because of congenital factor, and other factors. Children prompted the development of cognitions and emotions by a locomotion experience. As the locomotion experience for the purpose of mutual approach each other with a helper, I was paying attention to the soccer experience. I made a soccer system on an experimental mainly designed for mounting the move support equipment for handicapped children, and I constructed a soccer system using the unit. I propose the soccer system that can be used in a broader range. As a result this system prompt handicapped children to work on the surrounding environments.

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In recent years, the aging of population is advancing. In consequence, physical burden of caregiver increases due to die increase of their work. In this point of view, we have developed a care transfer machine to reduce the physical burden of caregiver in the caregiving work. In this study, physical stress of the care receiver that is caused by the proposed care transfer machine is investigated. In order to clear the physical stress, EMG is used. We measured the physical stress with respect to two types of Human Body Holding Part. As the results of the measurement, maximum muscle potential is 8 [%] of the maximum muscle mass in riding action. Further, muscle potential in the consciously straining is 12 [%]. Therefore we clear that the riding action with type of Human Body Holding Part doesn't affect the physical stress on the care receiver through some experimental results.

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Essential Tremor (ET) is a kind of tremor and the cause isn't understood. In general, ET is suppressed by medicines which may give a patient side effects and not give enough effects. Therefore, another suppression method which is more reliable and doesn't give physical stress very much is required. Hence, we propose a method to suppress ET by using an exoskeleton robot. In this paper, we measure upper-limb's motions by using the upper-limb's motion measuring system as a preliminary experiment. The system consists of an encoder and 3 accelerometers and gyroscopes and can measure an upper-limb's motion three-dimensionally. In the experiments, subjects are healthy persons and they imitated an ET patient motion. From the results, it was confirmed that hands of subjects with tremor movement move three-dimensionally.

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Electric wheelchairs have been widely used by the elderly and care recipients. Since the wheelchairs require hand-operation, it have two problems. First, drivers cannot deal other tasks requiring their hands. Another is it cannot be used by persons disabled in hands. Additionally, it is preferable driver's hands is free for safety. In this study, an inverted pendulum type wheelchair is developed that enables turning based on sensing air pressure of the cushion, and back and forth movements by the motion of the body without the hand-operation. A back and forth movements and rotational control systems for the wheelchair are designed using a disturbance observer.

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An electric wheelchair for indoor use should automatically avoid obstacles in its path and stop at hallway intersections to await instructions from the user. Here we propose a path control method in which an environment map including indoor hallway intersection information is constructed and self-position is estimated using a particle filter. Using laser range finder, the center of an intersection is estimated from the collected intersection information by using our intersection recognition technique. Through use of the intersection map and intersection recognition technique, the initial position from the particle filter can be estimated. The obstacles are detected from the comparison of the map at the same time. And a path is generated to avoid an obstacle by The Velocity Obstacles algorithm using this information. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by an experiment.

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With our conventionally developed seamless interface between PC world and real world, we have been studying a teaching method for a caregiving robot. This interface allows you to intuitively operate the robot motion just like conventional GUI manner in PC world. In this report, we propose a real world cursor with which the user can easily locate the laser spot in the viewing window.

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Conventional cushions to prevent pressure ulcer have not completely realized the objective. For example, cushions filled with air do not sink enough to disperse the load. On the other hand, cushions filled with liquid sink excessively, and thus buttocks may hit on the bottom of the cushions. In this paper, we develop a cushion to solve these problems. Our developed cushion consists of multiple balls named "cell structures," each of which has air in the core and liquid around the core. We confirm that the cushion can realize both load dispersion and prevention of bottoming by experiments.

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In recent years, Japan faces the issues of a super-aging society, population decrease and shortage of young workers. A robot that contact with people must be safe, light weight, and flexible. Therefore, we developed a device using a pneumatic cylinder to support a patient's upper limb motion. This supporting device has two modes corresponding to livelihood support and rehabilitation. We designed a compliance control system and a position control system for these modes. We use a predictive functional control (PFC) for these control system. We compared a control performance of the device with that of the PFC and the PID control system.

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This paper describes an anomaly behavior detection system for elderly people based on a temperature sensor. The proposed monitoring system automatically learns daily behavior patterns and detects anomaly behavior patterns. Some feature values such as position and posture are extracted from the captured temperature data and anomaly behavior is detected as an outlier by One-Class SVM with Virtual Outliers. Some experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system.

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Myoelectric hand is a prosthetic hand to perform the estimated motion based on the myoelectric potential generated from the human arm, therefore the precise motion recognition is essential. Then, myoelectric potential tends to change in arm posture change. This study proposes a motion recognition method using fuzzy reasoning in response to changes in the myoelectric potential due to the arm postures change. The polynomial regression is applied to the measured myoelectric potential in order to represent the posture change characteristics, and fuzzy reasoning with the membership function based on the polynomial approximation and standard deviation is utilized for the motion recognition. Some experiment results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Power-assisted wheelchairs are effective for the rehabilitation of handicapped people, however, the users with unbalanced force of right and left arms by injury or disease are difficult to drive as expected. Therefore, this paper proposes a drive control system that combines a fuzzy model and polynomial model to estimate the driving trajectory from the right and left pushing torque. The fuzzy model determines the appropriate operating input by estimating the user intention, and the driving trajectory is determined using polynomial model. Some simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed driving control system.

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In this paper, Over view and System configuration of Rbotics Walker are described. This has four types, Standby mode and Driving mode, Rotation mode, Warning mode. At power-on, it makes standby mode. Then, It becomes a Driving mode Walking for two-hand control SW is pressed, Rotation mode is pressed Upper rotation release SW. When walking, it's an emergency stop become more than set speed.

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The conventional speaking valves have one-way valve architecture, they open when the user breathes in, and they close when user breathes out and produce voices. This type is very simple and tough, but some users feel closeness in case of exhalation without phonation. This problem is caused by its mechanism what can't be controlled by user's will. Therefore, we proposed an electrical control-type speaking valve system to resolve this problem. This valve is controlled by neck myoelectric signal of sternohyoid muscle. Furthermore, we proposed the compact myoelectric control-type speaking valve system. The new-type speaking valve was enough small to attach the human body, and its opening area is larger than that of conventional one. In this report, we described the improvement of flow channel shape by using of FEM analysis. According to the result of the analysis, it was clarified that the shape-improved speaking valve gets the low flow resistance channel.

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It is ethically unacceptable to engage people with impaired motor functions in experiments, wherein they may face pain and risk of injuries. We developed a wearable robot for healthy adults and its control algorithm to simulate the behaviors of patients with knee osteoarthritis. In order to simulate patient movements by a healthy person wearing a robot, we formulated a model motion that represented invariant patient motions. We then determined the output torque of the exoskeletal knee robot such that the wearer's motion followed the model motion. The effectiveness of the method was testified for standing-up and sitting-down motions, and some characteristic impaired motions such as body inclination to the healthy side and imbalanced right and left knee angles were manifested by the simulator.

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Big-hand is a device which holds a human body safely and realizes supporting for standing-up motion. In this paper, we describe how to control its holding force to human body. The force increases along with its inner pressure, so we could control it by making three states: pressurizing, inner pressure keeping, and decompression state. To realize the three states, we use fluid pouch. It was made by connecting normal tube and wound tube, which is filled with water. Pushing the normal tube makes the wound tube to be expanded. This expansion switches mechanical valve to realize the three states. We experimented with human body to indicate that fluid pouch can switch the mechanical valve, and with this control mechanism. Big-hand can hold human body more safely and comfortably.

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This paper presents a power assist crane driven with a differential gear and two wires. By using a differential gear, the crane can be controlled with one motor. The operation force is detected from the difference of two angles of the differential gear. As a result, the load of work was compensated even if it changes, and the operator can move a heavy load directly and freely.

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In recent years, autonomous transport with omni-directional vehicles researched in the production field. However, when performing the linear movement on the belt conveyor, there is a problem to be flowed into the drive direction of the conveyor. In this paper, we propose the control algorithm with mecanum wheel to achieve linear movement in spite of the motion of belt conveyor. And a good performance is evaluated by measurement of error in the experiment. Thus, we have constructed the omni-directional vehicle to be available hi the production field.

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We developed the method of detecting the cup by weight change pattern of electronic scale automatically. It concern to liquid filling machine. Without additional sensors, the production process advanced one step.

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In the near future, the aging society, anywhere go wheelchair has been expected. Mainly, There are a rear-wheel-drive and a front-wheel-drive to the wheelchair. However, they have different characteristics. So, users of the wheelchair feel inconvenient. In this study, it is intended to improve the linearity of the front-wheel drive. Therefore, we experimented for rear-wheel drive and front wheel drive in order to examine the behavior of the wheelchair. The running trace from the angular velocity of wheels and the instruction of the joystick as the behavior of the wheelchair. Then, we compared both and carried out simulation of front-wheel drive wheelchair.

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