In the operation of digital twins for realizing smart cities, the inability of urban infrastructure location data to autonomously adapt to real-world changes hinders high-precision simulation and optimization. To address this challenge, we are investigating a method that automatically estimates accurate locations using indirect information—operation and activity data obtained from vehicles in service—rather than directly measuring the geographic information of urban infrastructure. This research enables stable position estimation by eliminating the effects of noise and outliers present in the data. Specifically, we verify a set of methods that first achieve automatic noise filtering and cluster separation using DBSCAN, then determine robust true object coordinates resistant to outliers using spatial medians. This paper applies the proposed methods to our garbage collection visualization system under development, quantitatively demonstrating the detection accuracy of discrepancies between master data and the latest real-world position information, as well as the robustness and effectiveness of each method. This demonstrates the feasibility of implementing data assimilation technology to maintain the accuracy and reliability of the digital twin platform.

In the smart home field, it has been pointed out that interoperability between different standards is difficult due to the differences in the ecosystems supported by each device. As a new communication standard to address this issue, Matter-developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance has emerged and is gaining attention for its high compatibility with major smart home ecosystems. However, compatibility with ECHONET Lite, which is the standard adopted within Japan, has not been established, making direct interoperability between the two systems difficult. The authors have previously proposed the iHAC Hub as a system enabling interoperability between devices with different communication standards. In this study, we enabled bidirectional collaboration between ECHONET Lite devices and Matter devices by extending the iHAC Hub with Matter communication functionality. Furthermore, we introduced the concept of the Web of Things (WoT) and investigated a mechanism to express the correspondence between the iHAC Hub’s unique message format and the data structures of each communication standard using the WoT’s Thing Description (TD) format. Evaluation using actual devices confirmed that the proposed system can mediate communication between the two protocols in a short time, demonstrating its effectiveness as a method for interworking between devices with different communication standards.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication emerges as a potent paradigm in distributed processing models. However, network accessibility challenges and inherent limitations in ex-isting solutions have impeded the full realization of P2P's poten-tial. To address these issues, we've developed CYber PHysical Overlay Network over Internet Communication (CYPHONIC), an innovative solution enabling P2P-based direct device-to-device communication while ensuring robust zero-trust security. Additionally, we introduce the concept of a gateway device equipped with a CYPHONIC adapter to cater to conventional devices, often referred to as general nodes. Our paper focuses on implementing a remote camera monitoring solution, providing secure access to surveillance cameras. We aim to demonstrate that our overlay network seamlessly connects all CYPHONIC clients, including general nodes. We also present a comprehensive case study centered on remote camera monitoring. This case study showcases the effortless connectivity enabled by our overlay network, highlighting how CYPHONIC clients, including general nodes, can efficiently interconnect.

Some Internet of Things (IoT) devices for smart lock systems, home management systems have been released in recent years. Almost all services employ a client-server model because direct communication among these devices is difficult due to the Network Address Port Translation (NAPT) mechanism. Recently, some new ideas such as a fog computing and an edge computing have been proposed to create a distributed service. A direct communication is suitable for these ideas because each service devices should communicate with each other to realize a distributed processing. The authors have been developed Network Traversal with Mobility (NTMobile) which is a protocol for realizing a direct communication between devices and a secure communication. This paper extends the secure communication mechanism of NTMobile to realize a direct encryption key exchange mechanism between devices by employing the technology of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). The developed protocol can provide a mutual authentication mechanism and secure encryption key exchange mechanism among devices. The evaluation results show that the overhead of the developed implementation is not large in practical services comparing to the conventional key exchange mechanism of NTMobile.

Smartphones are a new type of mobile devices that users can install additional mobile software easily. In the almost all smartphone applications, client-server model is used because end-to-end communication is prevented by NAT routers. Recently, some smartphone applications provide real time services such as voice and video communication, online games etc. In these applications, end-to-end communication is suitable to reduce transmission delay and achieve efficient network usage. Also, IP mobility and security are important matters. However, the conventional IP mobility mechanisms are not suitable for these applications because most mechanisms are assumed to be installed in OS kernel. We have developed a novel IP mobility mechanism called NTMobile (Network Traversal with Mobility). NTMobile supports end-to-end IP mobility in IPv4 and IPv6 networks, however, it is assumed to be installed in Linux kernel as with other technologies. In this paper, we propose a new type of end-to-end mobility platform that provides end-to-end communication, mobility, and also secure data exchange functions in the application layer for smartphone applications. In the platform, we use NTMobile, which is ported as the application program. Then, we extend NTMobile to be suitable for smartphone devices and to provide secure data exchange. Client applications can achieve secure end-to-end communication and secure data exchange by sharing an encryption key between clients. Users also enjoy IP mobility which is the main function of NTMobile in each application. Finally, we confirmed that the developed module can work on Android system and iOS system.

With the spread of mobile devices, there is a growing demand for direct communication between users. However, under recent complex IP networks, it is extremely hard to establish a direct connection between devices. In order to solve the problem, authors have been proposing a new end-to-end communication architecture called "Network Traversal with Mobility" (NTMobile). In NTMobile, applications in the mobile device establish an end-to-end connection by using virtual IPv4/IPv6 addresses in the NTMobile network independent from real IP networks. In this demo, we will show that Android smartphones can make free communication with each other without any constraint such as an NAT traversal problem in IPv4 networks and incompatibility between IPv4 and IPv6 architectures.

IP mobility is the technology that realizes a continuous communication even when communicating wireless nodes switch access networks. NTMobile (Network Traversal with Mobility) is a new type of IP mobility technology for the IPv4 and IPv6 networks. NTMobile nodes can also achieve IP mobility in global IP networks as well as in private IP networks by creating a tunnel route between a pair of NTMobile nodes. In NTMobile, network applications use virtual IP addresses to achieve a continuous communication at the time when real IP addresses change due to the switching of access networks or node movements. In NTMobile, we implement a packet manipulation method in the Linux kernel module so as to achieve high levels of throughput performance.

In the field of pet robots and robot-assisted therapy (RAT), characterization of animal motion is important for the development of robots resembling various animals. This paper presents a method for the generation of animal gait in quadrupedal robots. In this study, we employed AIBO as an experimental quadrupedal robot and generated the gait of the robot on the basis of an animal's gait. First, we optimized the mono-leg orbit, which can efficiently output a propulsive force, by imitating a dog's gait using a genetic algorithm. Moreover, we generated the quadrupedal gait of AIBO using both the optimum orbit of the mono-leg and an animal's gait, classified as the gait of a walking dog based on zoology. Furthermore, we administered a questionnaire study to determine subjective human feelings to choose the best gait for AIBO from among the various gaits mentioned above. Finally, minor deviation of parameters for each joint was corrected to realize the stable gait on the ground.

In the field of the pet robot and robot assisted therapy (RAT), the creatural motion is important for the robots imitated the form of various animals. This paper presents the generation method of animal gait for quadrupedal robot. Here, we have employed AIBO as experimental quadrupedal robot and created the gait of AIBO in imitation of animal gait. At first, We have optimized the orbit of mono-leg, which can output propulsive force efficiently, by imitating dog gait and genetic algorithm. Moreover, We have generated the quadrupedal gait of AIBO using both the optimum orbit of mono-leg and animalpsilas gait, which is classified the gait of walking dog based on the zoology. And furthermore, we have performed questionnaires to include the human feeling, and chosen the best gait for AIBOpsilas animal walking from among the above-mentioned various dogpsilas gait.

There have been many attempts to realize human-like visual function by image processing. Methods for recognition and tracking of the human face are expected to be applied in security systems and in the field of ITS (intelligent transport systems). This study was performed to construct a detection system capable of recognizing multiple areas of the human face in real tune. We employed a hybrid GA (genetic algorithm) based on selective attention, which is the human visual function used to reduce processing load, to search for the position of a face in input images. The hybrid GA consisted of random searching as a rough search and an improved GA that performed a more careful search. These methods were combined by grouping to allow simultaneous detection of multiple faces in input images in real time. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed detection system by experiments involving detection of multiple targets.

This paper presents a vision related technique for a manipulator real-time visual servoing to catch fish and intelligent observation of the fish trying to escape from the net attached at the robot hand. The visual recognition method utilizes both the global and local search features of genetic algorithm (GA) and the unprocessed gray-scale image (or raw-image) in order to perform recognition of a known target object being imaged. Also, in GA process, the computation of the fitness function is based on the configuration of an object model designated as surface-strips model. The raw-image is used since it is more tolerant to contrast variations from an input image to the next one, and does not require any filtering processing time, which is useful for real-time recognition. The global GA is utilized together with the local GA in order to recognize the target shape and detect the position and orientation simultaneously, and to increase the GA's convergence speed so as to provide faster and better recognition results. Experiments to track a fish by hand-eye camera and catch it with a net attached to the hand of the manipulator were carried out. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated.