In this paper a continuous jump only using one linear actuator which is the simplest one is aimed to be realized. The continuous jump is possible in our case because the model does not have its center of gravity on the line of action. Then the experiment of continuous jump was carried out.

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The aim of this paper is to apply a nonlinear control based on equilibrium point analysis to an inverted pendulum. First, a nonlinear function of the control input is determined by the analysis, and the gains to replace unstable point with stable one are obtained. Finally, it is demonstrated that the pendulum can be transfered from pendant state to inverted one by the proposed nonlinear control.

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This paper introduces the modified slip energy recovery system in order to improve its power factor. The chopper type IGBT is applied across the DC terminal and the chopped DC is fed to the converter operating as an inverter. This scheme leads to be able to adjust the speed of the motor by the duty cycle of the chopper operating in PWM mode. The fuzzy logic controller is also introduced to the MSERS for keeping the motor speed to be constant when the load varies. The experimental results in testing the 1.0 kW wound rotor induction motor from no-load condition to rated condition show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

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Linear optimal exciting controller in a multivariable generator was proved which could not only remove low-frequency oscillations and sub-synchronization oscillations, but also improve the stability of a transmission system and the dynamic performance of the system. Because this kind of linear time-invariant feedback controller based on a design of certain normal operating point keeps the optimal control effect only on the operating point. If the real operating point moves from the designed certain normal operating point, the control effect will go worse. A new method is proposed in this paper to design a fuzzy reasoning machine. Based on the linear optimal exciting controller, a fast fuzzy adaptive exciting control of the generator is realized. Digital simulating results had shown the improvement of the control performance.

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This paper proposes a PI controller to be functioned in the steady state area to result in high steady state performance and a sliding mode controller that functions in the transient area to result in high transient performance. To combine these two controllers, an outer fuzzy logic controller is to be implemented to switch between them. This is a solution to the chattering problem of the sliding mode controller for induction motors.

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This paper introduces the use of sliding mode control to improve the performance of vector control method that is used for the speed control of induction motors. The result is a controller with high degree of robustness and accuracy. It is shown here how the sliding mode controller is designed to cancel any perturbations caused by disturbances and parameter uncertainties.

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In this paper a part of the control system is implemented by a fuzzy logic controller due to the complexity and nonlinearity of control equations. By using linguistic variables in place of numerical variables, this approach represents a substantive departure from the conventional quantitative techniques of system analysis and control. This paper presents the use of fuzzy logic based speed control for field-oriented controlled AC motor.

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This paper presents a new hierarchical scheduling method for a large scale manufacturing system based on the hybrid petri net model, which consists of CPN (Continuous Petri Net) and TPN (Timed Petri Net). The automobile production system, which is one of a typical large scale manufacturing system, is focused. Our proposed scheduling method can macroscopically schedule the flow in entire system and can microscopically consider physical constraints, which come from real shop floor.

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We propose a formalism for decentralized control of discrete event systems with communications. The formalism is based on PN², a class of agent-oriented Petri nets proposed by the author. The main difference between PN² and Petri nets is that each token, representing an agent, is also a Petri net. The decentralized control system to be modeled has the following featurs: (i) The system is asynchronous and has no global clock. (ii) Some events may occur concurrently. (iii) The system is controlled by several control agents, each of which perceives only a subset of occurring events, and can control only a subset of events. (iv) Each control agent can communicate with other agents. By communications, each agent can know occurrences ofevents that are not observable for it, and can ask other agents to disable events that are not controllable for it. Using the formalism, we define a problem concerning control synthesis.

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The behavior of discrete event systems is very complex. The fixed order of the process sequence is not proper for the control of such systems. The flexible control for discrete event systems can be implemented by Petri net concept.

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Autonomous distributed manufacturing systems(ADMS) consist of multiple intelligent components with each component acting according to its own judgments. The ADMS objective is to realize more agile and adaptive manufacturing systems. This paper presents the introduction of context-dependent agents (CDAs) in ADMS have been proposed, and switch strategies depending on system conditions to achieve better performance than can be realized by agents that use the same strategies under all system conditions. For the real-time job scheduling problem, the paper recalls a basic CDA architecture, and presents the results of an extensive empirical evaluation its performance relative to other rule-based schemes based on several common indices for real-time dispatch.

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The main problem of reinforcement learning is that learning converges slowly. As one of the solution, McGovern proposed “macro-action”. However, a human expert needs to design macro-actions which adapt to an environment. In this paper, we propose a new method that enables to generate the macro-actions which adapt to the enviroment automatically using genetic algorithm.

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Single fiber action potentials (SFAPs) in a cylindrical volume conductor whose boundaries are identified is derived by an analytical method, taking the end of the volume conductor and nerve fiber into consideration. As a result, in the calculated SFAPs, a far-field potential is observed when the source reaches the end of the fiber.

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We revised the protocol of peri-stimulus time histograms and developed its statistical test. In this method a conditioning stimulus is triggered by previous activation of a motor unit and an interval to next activation was measured. The interval from a sham stimulus to next activation is also acquired as control samples, and the total number of samples in the control situation is 4 times as large as that in the conditioning situation. A statistical test is established by probabilistic model.

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In this paper, it was investigated that feature extraction method of ERP (Event-Related Potential) under the visual recognition task. First, visual oddball experiments were executed. We examined obtained response EEG about amplitude characteristic, frequency characteristic, and pattern recognition based on AR model. It is confirmed that our method was effective and optimal locations of electrode were occipital by the experiment.

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As a basic approach to realization of the real-time image generation that reflectsects physiological and psychological state, in this study, an auditory biofeedback system mediated by the cross-correlation coefficient ρ_max from blood pressure to heart rate has been developed. First, a personal computer system that can calculate ρ_max in real time has been developed. Next, a feedback loop has been added to the system so that the magnitude of a noisy sound presented to the subject can be changed according to ρ_max. The results obtained from the experiments using this system indicated that the auditory biofeedback loop mediated by ρ_max can be realized. However, the fine tuning of the controller in consideration of individual difference is required for establishing a sufficiently stable feedback.

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A mathematical method was introduced to characterize thermodynamical properties of the biomolecular reaction field composed of high density gene regulating biomolecular particles. The method was originally proposed by Haris and Rice (1959,60). The Boltzmann equation was modified by a coarse graining and the pair transition probability was introduced to the kernel of the integral part of the Boltzmann equation. The post collision distribution function was expressed by the local equilibrium distribution function and the perturbation. The perturbed solution was expressed by the Sonine polynomials. The coefficients were given by solving three sets of 8 linear r algebraic equations. By these procedure, we have the transport equations and computed the diffusion coefficient, shear stress and heat flux. The present method will be available for characterizing the local biophysical field at high density molecules.

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Mutual interaction of rhythm is widely observed in the performance between humans. However, one-sided action is dominant in the interaction between human and musical machine. Thus, in this research, we try to realize human-like accompaniment system by using mutual interaction between rhythms. To design the model of system, we analyzed performance between human and human and constructed the system

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Mutual interaction of rhythm is widely observed in the music performance between humans. In this study, based on our previous research, we used mutual entrainment model in coupled phase oscillators. And we try to construct an ensemble support system to realize such mutual interaction process. As a result, comparing with direct ensemble between two humans, effectiveness of our new support system was suggested.

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In this paper, we propose a location information system based on Bayesian learning. The system has been developed with the aim of supporting activity in a community. Recently, GPS has been used to detect location. However, GPS has a problem in that it fails to detect an exact location in some situations. Thus, we propose a mechanism based on Bayesian learning, which can reason an exact location by using three types of location information.

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In this paper, we propose a recommendation system which can share other individuals’ knowledge and know-how for research activity. The system can recommend interesting document files to users by collaborative filtering. In the system, we employ local similarity between users and global similarity between groups. Using this system, users can find out necessary knowledge and reuse knowledge effectively.

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The purpose of this paper is formalizing an informal group system model consists of the interpersonal relation system components that are emotinal balancing cellular automata designed by agent-based approach. The framework of the interpersonal relation system model is based on the general system theory and the social psychological interaction theories, that are Heider’s balance theory and Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory. The individual system which composes of an informal group system model has the einvironment models. The environment models represent the pressure of emotion and any other things of the ncighbourhood.

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This paper presents current state of RoboCupRescue International Cooperative Research Project. It consists of Simulation Project and Robot Project. Simulation Project developed a version 0 simulator that consists of 4 disaster simulators, various autonomous agents of disaster response, a geographic information system, 3 simulation viewers and a distributed simulation kernel. Key points of this system from the viewpoint of disaster science is 1) synthetic simulation of heterogeneous phenomena and behaviors, 2) simulation of response behaviors including human organization. Simulation results show effectiveness of this simulation and are being applied to local government. Robot Project started a contest. The field where robots are tested is developed by NIST to simulate real disaster situations. The evaluation rule considers accuracy and efficiency of search and surveillance of victims in confined space of structures. Participants deployed for real operations at the New York World Trade Center terror, and found about 10 victim bodies. A network-based new urban infrastructure is proposed. It consists of robotic systems and IT devices. They are integrated by the distributed architecture.

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The Japanese government is establishing an International Rescue Complex to promote research and development of key technologies for realization of practical search-and-rescue robots, anticipating for future large-scale earthquakes and other catastrophic disasters. This paper proposes a new paradigm called “snakes and strings”, for developing practical mobile robot systems that may be useful in such situations. “Snakes” stands for snake-like robots, which can skillfully move among the debris of the collapsed buildings. “Strings”, on the other hand, means the use of robotic systems equipped with reels of strings. These strings can continuously supply energy, accomplish reliable communication link, and also exhibit high traction force. These characteristics are based on the “hyper-tether” concept. This paper will show many new mechanical implementations of snake-like robots developed in our lab, and also explain in detail the new paradigm.

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In every year and in allover the world, we have great disasters such as great earthquakes or flood disasters and so on. In 1995, we had a great earthquake in the Kansai region in Japan. After the earthquake, the researches of rescue system have been started. In this note, we discuss a new engineering field named Rescue Engineering. This field is going to construct to backup the movement of researches of rescue systems. And to backup the construction of the Rescue Engineering, we propose a new robot contest concerned with rescue activity. This contest is called Rescue Robot Contest.

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The present paper proposes two kind of mine detection robots which mean the six-legged walking robot with two manipulators based on the added stability, mobility, and functionality. One robot is COMET-II which is driven by electric power and not so big robot. The another robot is a full autonomous robot COMET-III which is driven by hydraulic power. COMET-III has a crawler and six legs and its weight is 900Kg. The improved this kind of robot will be engaged for mine detection job in Afghanistan soon.

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Through the experience of developing GIS for disaster prevention [1] [2][3] we noticed that requirements for GIS could be divided into at least 3 categories. The first type of GIS is for regional analysis and decision-making based on data integrating detailed geographical historical (temporal) information of a region to the maximum extent. This type of GIS can give solutions for federal or local government requirements. The second type of GIS is for general public use such as to use instead of paper map. Requirement of data is mainly positions of geographic objects which are subsets of the first type of GIS data and such as service information mainly as attributes which are gathered by unspecified people and system has to be simple. The third type of GIS is for special purposed GIS such as car navigation systems of which functional requirements are almost finalized. Compactness, efficiency, and cost are important. We will propose a solution which satisfies a variety of requirements of GIS by combination of non-internet GIS and internet/web GIS related to realization of disaster mitigation and environment analysis. As geographic information is based on culture and way of living of each country, we believe GIS based on Asian culture has to be developed by collaborative research and development of Asian countries.

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There are involved a number of general technical problems in the rescue simulation project for mitigation of large scale disasters. First, we overview how the rescue simulation will be meaningful and valuable in conjunction with real world disasters. Then we clarify the technical problems to be solved to develop a really usable, state-of-the-art rescue simulation system. But more important point is that such a rescue simulation system should be so constructed not very special with respect to the ordinary daily works of local government offices. All of these are challenging problems, so that we have in mind a feasible road map to attack them in a proper order to be able to have a good outcome.

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The transmission delays in the networked control systems are inevitable and can which degrade the system performance or stability. This paper has proposed a compensation method for networked control systems with network induced delay using LMI-based delay-dependent optimization method. The delay-dependent optimization method has adapted to provides an upper bound of the delay such that the system is asymptotically stable. Some simulations applied to numerical examples with networked control show that the proposed method works well.

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In a case that a lot of field devices provided by many different manufacturers are linked by one network, troubles of a distributed system will be difficultly identified. In this paper, we make the point that software tests of interoperability among these field devices are needed to ensure the system compatibility over a field network. First, we survey the international standards related to the measurement and control domain and point out the necessity of such software tests. Second, we describe an outline of structure of the next generational manufacturing systems and discuss in detail what have to be needed for software tests. Finally, we propose some items of software tests and give a frame in the case of function blocks.

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In this paper, we develop a distributed simulator to integrate multiple partial simulators of the complex system to one simulator. Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) is used in the platform connected network and JNI (Java Native Interface) is used to link with the various languages.

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This paper describes the spectral image measurement of the agricultural products based on the near infrared diffuse reflectance. Spectral image was obtained by a developed measuring system using the model samples and the real lettuce samples. The correlation among of the near infrared images and the chemical or the taste preferences has been studied. This image measurement could offer a new image information server to monitor the growth of the agricultural products on the fields. This paper also describes the maturity judgments model based on spectral image information.

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A simple and high accuracy optical intelligent alignment system using a position sensor of a diffraction grating is proposed by our Asian group. From a simulation of this system using a permeation type diffraction grating, we can conclude that it is possible to improve the wide position definition from ±0.25mm to ±12μm with the precision accuracy of ±4nm.

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In this paper, we discuss an adhesion problem of double clamped beams with some ‘dimples’ on the surface. We also derive some formulas for designing the dimensions of the dimples and the length of beams. On beams, the adhesion is dominated by the dimension of the center dimple, and the maximum length of beams which do not adhere to their substrate decreases with the inverse cube of the dimple.

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This paper is concerned with trajectory tracking and obstacle avoidance control using avoidance manipulability of redundant manipulators. A system conbined an aboidance control system and preview control system was proposed last year. However, through the simulation studies in last year, it became clear that the shape of redundant manipulator was not always kept to the best configration in order for the avoidance. As the solution, we suggest a technique to evaluate aboidance manipulability of the whole configration of manipulator.

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This research addresses the trajectory tracking problem of industrial robot manipulators, at the corners of a Cartesian three-dimensional trajectory. The goal is to determine the maximum tangential velocity of the end-effector as it traverses a circular arc at a trajectory corner while avoiding joint acceleration saturation. The proposed method first derives the relationship between end-effector velocity and joint accelerations, and then develops a criterion to determine maximum tangential velocity so that only one joint marginally reaches its acceleration limit at a single point on the circular arc. The method was successfully experimented, and improved performance has been demonstrated.

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In this paper, we develop a new adaptive decentralized controller of robot manipulator for trajectory tracking. With the nonlinear control terms, the closed-loop system is globally stable. Furthermore, the adaptive decentralized controller is considered with a σ-modification term such that it becomes robust to the noise in practical implementation. Finally, a numerical study is provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

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Forcefree control can realize the flexible motion of industrial articulated robot arms without any change of the built-in controller. In this paper, the forcefree control was extended to realize the motion as if it were under the circumstance of any inertia, any friction and any gravity through the independent compensation of inertia, friction and gravity. The property of the forcefree control with independent compensation was also investigated by experimental study of an actual industrial articulated robot arm, where the external force was measured by the force sensor which was attached to the tip of the robot arm.

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The present paper discusses an optimal control method of biological robot arm which has redundancy of the mapping from the control input to the task goal. The control input space is divided into a couple of subspaces according to a priority order depending on the progress and stability of learning. In the proposed method, the search noise which is required for reinforcement learning is restricted within the first priority subspace. Then the constraint is relaxed with the progress of learning, and the search space extends to the second priority subspace in accordance with the history of learning. The method was applied to the musculoskeletal system as an example of biological control systems. Dynamic manipulation is obtained through reinforcement learning with no previous knowledge of the arm’s dynamics. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by computational simulation.

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The fall detection sensor for fall protection airbag was investigated to evaluate the airbag system. There are several methods to detect the fall; contact to the ground, detection of free fall. The problems with both methods are discussed. Because of usability the latter come into practical use. And tests in the future standard of airbag are discussed.

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This paper studies the reliability and safety of the k-out-of-n:G system as well as its optimal structure among the coherent safety monitoring system composed of n identical sensors. Considering transient failure and complete failure, when the expected loss (I) caused by fail-safe (FS) and fail-dangerous (FD) is used as the evaluation criteria of safety, the relationship between reliability and safety is expressed by an analytical formula. It is analyzed mathematically that the high reliability cannot completely guaranty its safety. Further, a simple formula to find the optimal k that can minimize I is obtained. The change of the optimal dynamic logic structure as time of the system elapses is argued. Illustrative examples are given.

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This paper is concerned with fault diagnosis using vector quantization of sound signal and its application to electromagnetic valve. Instead of establishing mathematical model, the vector quantization directly extracts characteristic vectors from sample data by optimized algorithms and uses these characteristic vectors as standard patterns to make fault diagnosis. Application to electromagnetic valve verified effectiveness of this new method.

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TOSHIBA developed the unique Ceramics which can absorb about 400 times as much CO2 as their volume and can repeat CO2 absorption and releasing. Combining the fuel reforming technique and CO2 absorption technique using this Ceramics, it becoming clearly that the realization of the CO2 collection technique from the fuel gas at the stage before combustion.

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This paper proposes a new method for evaluation of activated sludge coagulation based on image processing. In order to evaluate coagulation patterns, we employ a technique based on the fractal dimension. The result shows that the coagulation process can be evaluated by the variance of fractal dimensions.

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In this paper, we propose the application of sensitivity analysis in order to determine the key parameters of the wastewater treatment system, and also propose an identification algorithm based on the result obtained from the sensitivity analysis. Furthermore, we will verify the effectiveness of our proposed method by using real weather data: dry, rain, and storm.

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Currently installed electric meters in KEPCO have their own communication protocol. So we have many difficulties to manage various meters and to fix problems because vendors are reluctant to tell us the protocol. To solve these problems and to make a much more cost-effective metering system, KEPCO developed standard communication protocol which can be used by everyone easily.

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This paper presents practical application of recovering 3-D shape of non-rigid objects through a remote motion capture system. The system consists of two stages; a transfer stage and a recovery stage. A transfer stage includes two mobile cameras connected with two mobile computers at a remote place and a wireless LAN for capturing as well as transferring human motion images to a recovery stage. A computer placed in a laboratory takes the role of the recovery system to recover and represent the human motion in a 3-D way. Human standing up motion at a remote place is successfully recovered three-dimensionally.

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This paper deals with automatic MIDI data making system. We treat 8 kinds of instruments include polyphonic ones. First we performed blind signals separation by extended H-J method, and estimated channels of each frequency components. Then Harmonics structures and decay rates were automatically got from and according to these data, only fundamental frequency components were extracted. Finally pitch, volume, length, attack time, tone, and tempo were got from fundamental frequency components and MIDI data was made from. We got the system that could deal with plural instruments without setting different parameters.

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In this paper, we paid attention to the arrangement of satellites at the GPS measurement. In actual GPS measurement, the number of satellites and change in arrangement of satellites influence the accuracy. Therefore, we compared the result of experiments with that of simulation and considered what error factor influenced the accuracy.

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Nowadays, public order becomes worse, therefore a security system is necessary. In this paper, we propose the home security system that can build by individuals. The proposed system is constructed by a general-purpose personal computer, cellular phone and the Internet. Therewithal, the intruder’s image can be acquired. E-mail for warning is sent to a user when user is not in home.

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