かつて大型飛行船は大陸間定期航路に就航したこともあるが、現代では広告宣伝業務に少数の小型飛行船が従事しているのみである。市場拡大を阻む飛行船のボトルネックを現代の先進技術で打破し、交通・物流手段として甦らせる方策を探る。現代のハイテクで装いを新たにした飛行船の新しい用途を紹介する。飛行船は安全、快適、環境に優しく、経済的であり、特に過密な日本では空中移動手段として現代社会に受け入れられる可能性が高く、このための方策も紹介する。

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This paper describes the feature of train driver focusing on brain activity measured by using the newly developed train simulator and near-infrared spectroscopy (MRS). The developed train simulator can simulate the real train operation with designed task condition for measuring brain function of train driver. Blood flow measurement is carried out manual and automatic train operation. It is pointed out that the difference between manual operation and automatic operation can be seen in the blood flow of frontal lobe.

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TRANS-LOG machine accompanies a serious risk for its purpose (transportation, movement, handling) itself. Therefore, it is an important subject to secure safety in attaining its original purposes and functions. Since TRANS-LOG machine is widely used by general users in a society, it is required not only to be followed by the logic of engineering, but to be adjusted for a demand of society. And such demand has been changing in a great deal. For these reasons, many difficulties are found in establishing the safety of TRANS-LOG machine, which are not recognized in other machines. Safety has to be verified, and responsibility surely accompanies to safety. In this paper considered are expertise for safety, Code of Professional Conduct, responsibility of engineer for safety and the education of safety

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The research concerning wheel/rail contact mechanics is very important for technical innovations as well as safety of railway systems. We have organized an academic society for the study on this field in Japan since last year. In this paper I explain the necessity of the research on wheel/ rail contact mechanics and introduce our society named JSCM. In addition I introduce several technical topics in this field, such as corrugation, wheel tread/rail head profile, friction modifier, lubrication, etc.

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In this paper, two designs for optimal Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) transportation systems are presented. One is vertical and the other, horizontal. For these systems, the hybrid design methodology proposed here is used. Therefore, we describe how to model and formulate these transportation systems and derive the design parameters, that is, the optimal design solutions. We next evaluate these two transportation systems based on the various transportation requirements, that is, the demands from a port authority. For this purpose, we compare the systems based on the total costs in constructing them. Finally, the evaluation and analytical results are provided, and the most convenient system is presented based on the validity of each system for the given demand.

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Conventional manual career carts personally used do not have power units, and they often have small tires. A leading operation becomes difficult in case these are used in an unevenness intense road surface and a place with a level difference. Moreover, on stairs, continuous leading operation becomes impossible. Thereby, it is necessary to raise up and carry. In this research, the compact carrier cart to which the control theory of inverse pendulum is applied in order to reduce a lead person's physical workload sharply is developed, Stabilization by inverse pendulum control, the control system design and systems development which secures the flattery nature to lead operation of a user are studied.

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Upper gap crossing profiles and minimum gap width, which are formed between neighboring sidewalls of dual pneumatic tires, are different from lower gap ones of the dual pneumatic tires modified by depression. Therefore, a crossing profile of an antiskid device is similar to the upper gap profiles of the dual pneumatic tires, so that the antiskid device can be easily put on and taken off the upper gap and strongly held by the narrowing lower sidewalls. A contact face of the antiskid device has same height of the new dual pneumatic tires, consequently vibration and noise by driving a vehicle equipped the antiskid devices within the gap of the dual pneumatic tires are reduced in comparison with metal tire chains. Furthermore, divisional location of the antiskid devices arround the gap is reduced friction against road surface.

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Recently, tilting system of car body has been adopted in here and there in order to improve riding comfort. Tilting system has the ability of independently doing an tilting motion. so it ensured high reliability and safety so that it may not inhibit the riding comfort. But, in order to attempt further improvement of reliability, we have been studied the condition monitoring system with data processing. In this report, first to begin with the basic concept of condition monitoring system for composition rolling stock set is described. Here judgment technique of the line shape for condition monitoring is discussed in detail. In continueing, system constitution method and actual car test result are described. From car test result, a promising knowledge for future system constitution is obtained.

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On the derailment caused at Nakameguro station of Teito Rapid Transit Authority on march 8,2000, a precise report was presented from the Committee investigating the derailment. The report shows many facts on the derailment in running on sharp curve with low speed. This paper proposes a method to improvement the safety against derailment of Shinkansen Rolling Stock running on sharp curves.

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Aerodynamic characteristics of pantographs for high-speed trains are critical to maintain steady current collection. We present a new panhead in which air is taken in at the leading edge and ejected around the trailing edge to control the lift force. We estimate aerodynamic characteristics of this panhead by CFD and a wind tunnel experiment. The results show that the lift force can be controlled effectively by this method.

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We have developed a main circuit system using the DDM (Direct Drive Motor) as a new drive system for maintenance-free, improvement of motor efficiency and noise reduction. We have conducted a running test on A C Train (Advanced Commuter Train). In this paper, we report the development outline and test results of DDM.

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Autonomous hospital delivery robot has been developed. The robot delivers X-ray films or medicines, etc. on behalf of the hospital staff. The robot determines the appropriate path to the given destination based on the preprogrammed geographical data, and moves autonomously. If the robot encounters persons or anything else on the way, the robot stops or avoids them safely, then heads for the destination again. Moreover, the robot takes elevators by itself, when needed. It has been verified that the autonomous movement is fully safe and reliable in hospital where unspecified people exist. This paper describes the autonomous movement and the system for delivery operation.

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In recent years, the reduction of the logistics/distribution cost becomes most important factor on the company management. In such situation, retail business requires simpler wholesale trading and most wholesale dealer, which is specific in the Japanese market, is going to be eliminated. Major wholesale dealers find a means of survival on creation of value-added service including not only goods distribution but also "goods sorted distribution by category and by display aisle", "freshness management", "short lead-time delivery" and so on. The current manpower operation is getting hard to provide such good services. Therefore, it is required to satisfy both of "low-cost operation" and "flexible operation with highly-automated newest material handling system". This paper provides an introduction of the new developed case Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS), which is able to handle various sizes of goods. The feature of new case AS/RS is as follow: 1. Handling Goods Size: 150 mm-600 mm (90% of carton case size in retail seller) 2. High storage efficiency based on free storage location 3. Quick Cycle Time with ultrahigh-speed (30% quicker than before)

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This paper describes an inquiry of interviews and questionnaires in order to appreciate effects of ITS-solutions on customer's interest and increase of market for ferry lines. Also we appreciated the effects on solving traffic jam of roads on quay and parking. We analyzed area of possibility to control traffic from interviews to ferry and logistics companies. Some trends of favorable notice about ITS-solutions and advantage of ferry line use are extracted from the answers of the questionnaires to the general customers. We got the trend of the market increased by ITS-solutions and the solutions that expected and favored are based on the original technology and information of ITS.

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Recently, along with high-end products, users demand steel plates with high quality and high added value manufactured by a continuous steel plate process. In the factory, the continuous thin steel plate subjected to iron and steel processes is supported by a series of rollers during processes such as rolling. In the plating process, the steel plate is conveyed 20-50 m in the vertical direction for drying, during which the steel plate is not supported by rollers and other mechanisms. Therefore, plating nonuniformity due to the generation of vibration and other factors prevents the increase in productivity. As one method of solving this problem, we have proposed a noncontact guide system which suppresses the vibration of a moving thin-steel plate by adding an electromagnetic force from the direction of the edge of the plate. In this study, we confirm the suppressive effect of the sliding mode control.

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In this paper, a system following the forward vehicle automatically in all speed range is considered. As the control logic of this system, the method based on automatic control theories such as PID control is usually considered. When humans, however, actually get on the vehicle, the control logic has to be friendly to them. One of the solutions is to apply driver manner without negative properties such as the reaction time to the control logic. In this research, therefore, the driver model for acceleration and deceleration without the negative properties is devised and applied to the automatic vehicle following system with all speed range. Simulation work clarities the characteristics of the proposed driver model.

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In the automatic collision avoidance system that is one of the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), automatic braking and automatic steering can be considered as the collision avoidance method. In order to establish the automatic collision avoidance system, it is necessary to clarify the method and timing that contribute the minimum avoidance distance. For this issue, we reported the difference of minimum avoidance distance between automatic braking and automatic steering when these operate independently. It can be also, however, considered operation of automatic braking and automatic steering simultaneously as the avoidance method. The objective of this paper is to clarify the effect of the simultaneous operation by simulation of emergency obstacle avoidance. Consequently, the avoidance distance by the simultaneous operation is shorter than the one by the operation of automatic braking or automatic steering independently.

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This study examined driving behavior when using limited driving support systems. Specifically, we investigated the effects of driver comprehension level on driving behavior using a low-speed ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control) system in driving simulator experiments. The comprehension level was set to three conditions, "low," "middle," and "high," by the experimenter's instructions. We obtained the following results. Subjects with a low comprehension level for system limits exhibited greater braking latency when the system reached its support limits, and some of them collided with the preceding vehicle. Subjects with middle-level comprehension braked as safely as subjects with high comprehension.

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Probabilistic modeling was performed by applying the technique of system reliability engineering for the right-turn accident modeling based on the fall of the consciousness of a driver. This originates in state transition of human consciousness and the reaction time delay to recognize dangerous situation as factors of the accident. As a result, followings are clarified. The probability when the consciousness of a driver is foiling, is determined quantitatively by analyzing state transitions of consciousness. The probability when a right-turn and an on-coming driver would fail in collision is expressed at the probability of the fell of the consciousness of a driver and the probability of not avoiding a collision due to the fell of the consciousness.

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This study deals with a discrete simulation of the traffic flow of highways. The target of this study is to support the management administaration of highway's coorparate by the scientific technique. Each and every automobile, which has individual behavioral characteristics, is discretely modeled and the traffic flows are simulated dynamically by time marching method. The highway road itself is modeled as network which consists of nodes and links. This study presents some examples of traffic simulations of Tomei Highway from the Tokyo tollgate to the Yaizu interchange which have 320,000 automobiles in one day. Finally the logistic efficiency is analyzed by the time-value cost methods.

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The optimum design of highway tollgate is studied by a simulation method. The present simulation in this report is based on the discrete modeling of each cars, road and gates. The time-marching procedure is employed in this simulation and every car moves independently in each time steps. The field surveys of the behaviors of cars near tollgate are conducted, and the simulation models are implemented. This simulation method is applied to the Tokyo tollgate design of the Tomei highway and the optimum number and arrangement of ETC gates is given as a result of simulation combined with a optimization scheme.

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This paper presents active control of electromagnetic suspension for automobiles. The authors have proposed electromagnetic damper system for automobiles for improved ride comfort and compatibility between stability and isolation. In the past studies, the proposed damper has been used as passive suspension, but in this paper, it is used as active suspension. The targets of control are to improve ride comfort and isolation of vehicle body as well as to prevent reduction of wheel toad against the input of road roughness. The newly developed electromagnetic suspension is installed in the passenger car using sliding-mode controller. It was found that the active control of the proposed electromagnetic suspension makes possible to improve the performance by computer simulations and experiments.

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This paper investigates the improvement of front tire grip margin by using Direct Yaw-moment Control (DYC) which is designed from the viewpoint of tire force usage. The micro-scale electric vehicle 'NOVEL' is equipped with two in-wheel-motors at rear axle and their motor torques can be controlled independently to achieve the DYC. In this paper, the DYC, which control objective is determined as Neutral-Steer(NS) characteristics, is designed with the application of yaw moment following control. Finally, the effect of the DYC on improvement of front tire grip margin is proved by NOVEL on J-turn test.

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Various control systems for vehicle dynamics have been proposed. In future, it is important to use four tires efficiently with considering tire force usage in order to further enhance vehicle dynamics. Recently, research on "Smart Tire" which can measure in each direction forces between road surface and tires in real time is actively conducted. This paper focuses on the tire force distribution control, so-called DYC (Direct Yaw-moment Control) +Usage control, which optimizes tire force usage by using the information of tire forces acting between road surface and tires. The DYC +Usage control algorithm is presented and its control effect is analyzed by computer simulation.

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This paper describes a method to stabilize friction torque of Cable steering system. At first, we clarified a problem for applying conventional tension adjustment system to the cable steering system. For the solution, we suggest a new tension adjustment system with damping force generator. We confirmed the effect of the system by simulation and bench test.

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In the present report, traction/braking force optimizations of independent four-wheel steering vehicles are introduced. The maximum value of the tire workloads are minimized by online execution of the golden section search method combined with the binary search method. Their convergences are guaranteed by the convexities of the optimization problems. While the independent steering aims at the improvement of maneuverability, numerical simulations have been proved the robustness for a single steering actuator failure. The compensation effects to the actuator fixation are developed by the state feedback to the active steering controller.

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The natural frequency of the coil spring computed by the formula of WAHL is generally lager than experimental value. It is considered that this causes the form of end turns of spring. We compute the revised number of whole active turns with consider the number of turns to work as spring in end turns and revise the natural frequency based on the calculation. This revised value is in good agreement with experimental value.

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A self-paced preview tracking control model of motorcycle riders is proposed to represent the control action of a rider who is riding a motorcycle along a curved course, assuming that he can preview the ahead course and predict the future state of the vehicle based upon the present state, and that the previewed ahead course curvature is fed forward and the predicted future deviation is fed back to the rolling moment by shifting his weight and the vehicle speed command respectively. With this model the dynamics of such rider- motorcycle systems is investigated making use of numerical simulation. From these simulation experiments, adequateness of the model is confirmed.

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In late years, a problem of a traffic jam becomes a beginning social problem by increase of traffic volume on a town area and a highway. Technical introduction of ITS is expected to solve this problem. This study examines speed control algorithm of a vehicle in the traffic flow simulation that tracks mixes with cars aiming at increase of traffic volume. And in consideration of a human characteristic, we examine the influence that automatic driving and driving to be worked by hand give to traffic flow.

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A control method based on the theory of nonstationary sliding mode control is presented for an application to suppression of transeverse vibration of elevator rope. The transverse vibrations of ropes of high-speed elevator are caused by a resonance with sway of building which is subjected to an earthquake and big wind, hence, an effective solution is demanded. The nonstationary sliding mode control is effective for the control of elevator rope categorized by a time-varying system and robust for nonlinearity of a control device. In this paper, therefore, the vibration control for the elevator rope is performed based on the nonstationary sliding mode control using an input system which has gaps between an actuator and the rope because of preventing abrasions of rope. The suppression performance of the proposed method is examined by the numerical calculation on the condition of practical use. Consequently, the numerical results indicate that the performance of the proposed method is remarkable.

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In recent tall buildings, high-speed elevators are operated at very high speed so that the horizontal vibration of cage becomes a very important factor for evaluating riding comfort. As is discussed in ISO 8041, vibration sensibility of human body depends on its frequency characteristics. Moreover, not a continuous vibration but discontinuous vibration is also an important factor for evaluating ride comfort of high-speed elevator. Discontinuous vibration is occurred for example by guide-rail deformation or by passing each other. In such case, human body may perceive the discontinuous vibration in different manner between one, two or three cycles of the vibration that are excited in the cage. The objectives of this study are to clarify the frequency characteristics of human body vibration sensibility in the horizontal vibration, and also to clarify a relationship between the discontinuous vibration and ride comfort. According to the experiment, it is verified that the result shows a similar frequency characteristic to ISO 8041, and that the perception level of one cycle of discontinuous vibration is almost the same as 2/3 of the continuous vibration.

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AC motor drive tire-mounted gantry cranes with high mobility and superb maintainability are widely introduced into cargo handling work in container yards. The increase of cargo handling work efficiency and the labor saving are required for those cranes. In order to accomplish these requirements rationally, a traveling simulation method has been established to analyze the dynamic behavior of the cranes with high precision. It could be used for the optimization of crane structure or traveling trajectory control. In this paper, the simulation method is extended for cranes with AC motor drive system. The models of AC motor drive system, crane body, tire and the interaction between tire and road are shown. Moreover, the usefulness of this method is demonstrated with some simulation results.

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In the thin steel plates which are used in many industrial products, flaws on the plate surface and peeling during a surface treatment process are induced due to the use of many rollers in the conveyance process. These lead to the deterioration of the quality of the plate surface. Electromagnetic levitation techniques can solve many problems in the conveyance modes of sheet steel. The authors have proposed a magnetic levitation control system for maintaining the absolute distance of the plate surface and the electromagnet, and carried out an experiment on digital control. In this study, the equipment was designed so that electromagnets, which are used for the magnetic levitation of a steel plate, vibrate vertically. For basic research, a controlled object was assumed to be a single-degree-of-freedom model and disturbance cancellation control was used as the control method. The vibration isolation effect observed in the steel plate was confirmed by experimentation.

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For thin steel plates which are used in many industrial products including those of the automobile industry, we have proposed a magnetic levitation control system and confirmed its realization by means of the digital control experiment. However, in the case in which only the levitation control is applied to the steel plate, it has no horizontal restraining force on the direction of travel. Therefore electromagnetic actuators are installed in order to control the horizontal position movement of the levitated sheet steel. The electromagnetic attractive control forces of the actuators are given for the two facing edges of the levitated sheet steel, from the horizontal direction. In this paper, the suppression effect of elastic vibration of steel beam in the under electromagnetic field is reported.

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