In this paper, we will propose a conceptual design support system based on the notion of the universal design by using a model for representing artifacts which focuses on operational structure. We have already proposed a hierarchical model for representing interactive artifacts involving “intentions”, “operations and states” and “physical phenomena” which are tightly related with each other from teleological, causal and temporal aspects. In this model, artifacts are interpreted as interfaces between humans and environments. In this sense, the proposed model is suitable for representing artifacts which are designed based on the notion of universal design. In order to apply the proposed model to design support system, we have proposed the conceptual classes that are suitable for representing “physical causalities” and “operations” based on “Ontology Engineering”. In this paper, we will propose a simulation system of our proposed model. The system consists of an “extended petri net simulator” and a “physical causal network generating system”. They interact with each other via a “node observation agent”. In order to elucidate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we will show an example of operational analysis result of an artifact.

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This paper proposes a method of substitutive experience by virtual reality techiniques for supporting Universal Design of artifacts. First, we assume that human judgements can be described by a collection of “fuzzy sets” (fuzzy labels) and then propose a method of utilizing these fuzzy labels on physical characteristics and/or physical quantities of artifacts and/or of human beings for describing human sensory judgements. For supporting Universal Design of artifacts, it is then necessary to examine the variation of these fuzzy labels depending on the physical conditions (characteristics) of human users. Also it is necessary to introduce a method to adjust VR-incorporated virtual environments for designers to execute substitutive experience of various other persons. An illustrative example is shown where a designer evaluates a kitchen from two viewpoints, one from his original viewpoint and the other from a user's viewpoint with physical characteristics different from the designer. It is then shown that the method of substitutive experience can be effectively utilized for Universal Design of artifacts.

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This study is focused on the design and testing of a newly assisting unit for standard wheelchairs for hemiplegia person. People with the type of disability often drive standard wheelchairs one active hand and foot in the present situation. Convensional single side driven non-powered wheelchairs have various type of problems, e.g., large rotation radius, difficulty operations. The purpose of this paper is to solve these problems of current single side driven wheelchairs by using internal model control (IMC) design structure from technology of independence point of view. The control method by combining the IMC design with limiting properties of LQ control is implemented to the single side driven wheelchair. The experimental results show that the method is effective on tracking control for the single side driven wheelchair.

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Construction of barrier free society is desired especially for elderly and handicapped who need to use wheelchair in daily life. Stair climbing is the hardest barrier for those people. Supply of stair lift method is contribution to provide joy and satisfaction in life of those people.
By using our developed crawl-type mechanism on powered wheelchair, they can easily and effectively climb up and down stairs. These system are composed two parts, a few reformed powered wheelchair and drive guide and traction guide attached to stair wall. Presented system is cost effective compared with other conservative method, elevator, escalator and stair lift.

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It is required to explore the way of the universal design corresponding to the market expansion of the senior citizens. By using electronic dictionaries as samples, we investigated what kinds of features on products each age group from young to old expects, and examined the differences in needs of each age group.

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This paper describes generation of electroencephalography recognition patterns via genetic algorithm. We develop a simpler procedure for generating recognition patterns from an applicability point of view. The technique is time domain analysis based on correlation of electroencephalography data. As an analytical result through experiments, it realizes electroencephalography recognition with 68.2% success rate for unknown data.

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Machinery utilizing touch-panel display systems, including automatic teller machines and ticket machines, has become increasingly common. However, these systems cannot be used by persons with visual impairments, because visual information is displayed, whereas visually-impaired individuals recognize objects using the sense of touch. After confirming the position of a button on a machine by touch, they can push it. This is obviously incompatible with operating a touch-panel system, which responds as soon as the panel is touched.
Touch-panel systems can also cause difficulty for ordinary people. For example, people can become frustrated if they touch the screen by mistake, often feel somewhat unsure because the feeling of pushing a button is absent, and so on.
We have developed a new touch-panel system that combines the advantages of touch-panel systems and mechanical buttons. We expect that this system will prove useful for both visually-impaired and ordinary people. The system involves an aggregation of small displays arranged in a grid pattern and capable of independent up/down motion. Parts acting as buttons move up, and when pushed lightly, provide voice guidance regarding the function of the button. When pushed harder, buttons move down to initiate functions. The present paper introduces the prototype of this “visual and haptic display system”.

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Engineering Test Satellite-VII (ETS-VII) successfully performed the first autonomous Rendezvous Docking (RVD) flight using Rendezvous Laser Radar (RVR) in the world. ETS-VII is a test satellite to perform in-orbit demonstration of the autonomous rendezvous docking (RVD) technology. RVR navigation is used primarily in a final approach phase (from 500m to 2m from target satellite). In this paper, we introduce ETS-VII RVR design and evaluation results of its in-orbit performance. In-orbit performance is evaluated in comparison with another navigation sensors such as Proximity Sensor (PXS). Measurement accuracy of RVR is better than its requirement. And it is shown that Laser Radar is useful for rendezvous navigation sensor.

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With the rapid growth of high-aged persons, interest on health is increasing. From the viewpoint, development of unconstrained and non-invasive vital sign measurement systems is becoming important to monitor their health at homes, hospitals and nursing facilities.
This paper proposes an unconstrained and non-invasive measurement system of heartbeat of a walking subject wearing clothes with a built-in phonocardiographic (PCG) sensor. With the system, the PCG sensor extracts the heartbeat signal through a vibration of the sensor sensitive element and the periods of heartbeat and walking are measured by a pattern matching between the filtered output of the PCG sensor and a linear combination of the two types of sinusoidal functions with the periods as their parameters. The system will be expected to serve as a daily heartbeat monitoring system not only at homes but also at hospitals.

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This paper proposes the gain-scheduled inverse system and its design method. The inverse property of this system is characterized with a weight function and the induced L₂ norm. Though this system does not guarantee the inverse property when parameters are changing with time, it always guarantees the inverse property when parameters remain constant. As for design methods, the usual dynamic gain-scheduled controller has derivatives of parameters or the existence condition is formulated with BMIs (Bilinear Matrix Inequalities) owing to a parameter-dependent Lyapunov function. But with the proposed design method, the gain-scheduled inverse system does not have derivatives of parameters and the existence condition is formulated with LMIs (Linear Matrix Inequalities) despite using a parameter-dependent Lyapunov function, because there is a special condition; C₂=0 for a generalized plant. Thus the proposed design method makes a realistic gain-scheduled inverse system with ease. Finally as a numerical example, a gain-scheduled inverse system for a simple LPV (Linear Parameter-Varying) plant is designed and numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the gain-scheduled inverse system compared with an LTI (Linear Time-Invariant) filtered inverse system.

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In this paper, we propose a robust adaptive tracking control based on the backstepping strategy for strict-feedback nonlinear systems with non-parametric uncertain nonlinearities. It is shown that one can design a stable adaptive control system provided that the uncertain nonlinearities can be decomposed by unknown bounded nonlinear functions and known nonlinear functions. The proposed method can also deal with uncertain nonlinearities that appear in the control input term. Further it is shown that suitable choice of design parameters guarantees the convergence of tracking error to any desired bounds.

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Every homing missile guided by proportional navigation guidance (PNG) has a seeker to detect the line-of-sight (LOS) angle rate, which is essentially needed for PNG. But, this seeker also has the property of imperfect-gimbals-stabilization (IGS) that can lead to guidance instability. In this report, essential two types of the seeker, namely free-gyro-type and rate-gyro-type are given in the form of block diagram at first, then, 1) a missile guidance & control (G&C) system with seeker IGS is shown, which reveals the existence of a new parasitic loop in the G&C system; 2) a sufficient stability condition of the parasitic loop is derived by small gain theorem; 3) this condition is simplified by classical shaping method; 4) at the same time, the steady state error in acceleration control system is pointed out in the case of free-gyro-type seeker; 5) and finally, the results of 3) and 4) are confirmed numerically by MATLAB simulation.

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In a computer vision, a binocular stereo vision is a representative method for obtaining the 3-D information of object. The main issue in processing stereo images is to decide the correspondence points between a left image and a right image, that is, a stereo matching problem. Stereo matching on the images including occlusion and reversal position is a difficult problem. Efficient and effective methods have been not explored yet.
In this paper, we propose two new stereo matching algorithms. One is based on synergetics, which H. Haken proposed to describe self-organization in a dynamical system. The other is based on dynamic programming (DP). The stereo matching algorithm using synergetics is expressed with nonlinear differential equations with two parameters, which are called an order parameter and an attention parameter. The order parameter presents the degree of relationship between a feature point on one image and a correspondence candidate on the other image. The attention parameter has a role controlling the growth of order parameter in the differential equations. We incorporate various information on objects into the two parameters. The stereo matching algorithm using DP is a revision of a conventional DP stereo matching.
The two methods are applied to stereo matching experiments on wood block images including occlusion and reversal position. It is shown that the two methods have quite higher matching precision than a block matching method, and the algorithm based on synergetics has the highest matching precision.

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This paper presents a new interaction style for human- and machine-autonomies collaboration in a teleoperating environment. For this purpose, a robot teleoperating system is first analyzed after a judgment analysis method of the generalized Lens model framework proposed by A. Kirlik. Our model can provide a “shared communicational modality” directly accessible from both the operator and the robot's autonomy in perspectives of their perception and action. This modality promotes their mixed-initiative interactions to realize the naturalistic collaboration allowing the operator variability of actions including his/her “epistemic actions”.

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This paper presents a new method of in-flight alignment for a Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SDINS) under a large initial heading error. To handle the large heading error, a new attitude error model is introduced in which attitude errors are divided into heading and leveling errors using a newly defined horizontal frame. Some navigation error dynamic models are derived from the attitude error model for indirect feedback filtering of the in-flight alignment system. A Kalman filter with position measurements is designed to estimate navigation errors as an indirect feedback filter. Simulation results show that the newly developed model works effectively for coarse alignment of a large heading error. The proposed in-flight alignment method decreases the heading error very quickly from more than 40 degrees to about a few degrees.

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Anticipation in timing control is one of the important human's ability to cooperate with dynamic environment. In this research, we studied synchronization tapping as an example of timing control and Negative Asynchrony phenomenon in which the tap onset precedes to the onset of tone was observed. To clarify the mechanism of this anticipatory response from the viewpoint of time perception, effect of subject's attention was investigated. In order to control the attention, we used the silent reading as a secondary task of dual task method. In this condition, we measured the range of the period of tonal stimuli (Inter Stimulus Interval; ISI) which may be affected by the subject's attention using synchronization tapping task on ISI range of 450 to 6000ms. Consequently, it was revealed that the mechanism of this timing control depending on a subject's attentional resources works on ISI for about 1800ms or more. This result suggests that there are two modes of anticipatory timing control, an automatic one and an intentional one.

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The turbine flowmeter for the respiration measurement using bi-directional air turbine, which is suitable for wave energy conversion, is proposed and investigated experimentally by model testing. As a result, it is seems that the flow rate of reciprocating airflow can be obtained by the turbine flowmeter.

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This paper proposes a design method which is based on “-90° phase locus” associated with the open-loop transfer function of the optimal regulator. This leads to a simple technique, which permits a designer to achieve the objective to get a system with large phase margin.

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A system for monitoring the vibration of a transmission shaft by means of an eddy current displacement sensor has been developed, which provides the Lissajous figures and the occupation distribution of a single revolution in real time. The sampling frequency of data acquisition was 5kHz, which is sufficient for the speed of 1600 cycles/min used in many plants. The measurement error of the system is within 30μm, which is precise enough for our purposes.

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