As a novel therapy for peritoneal dissemination, it is desired to actualize an endoscopic photothermal therapy, which is minimally invasive and is highly therapeutically effective. However, since the endoscopic tumor temperature control has not been actualized, conventional therapies could damage healthy tissues by overhearing. In this paper, we develop a thermal endoscope system that controls the tumor temperature so that the heated tumor gets necrotic. In fact, our thermal endoscope contains a thermal image sensor, a visible light endoscope and a laser fiber. Concerning the thermal image sensor, the conventional thermal endoscope has the problem that the diameter is too large, because the conventional endoscope loads a large thermal image sensor with high-resolution. Therefore, this paper uses a small thermal image sensor with low resolution, because the diameter of the thermal endoscope needs to be smaller than 15mm in order to be inserted into the trocar. However, this thermal image sensor is contaminated by much noise. Thus, we develop a tumor temperature control system using a feedback control and tumor temperature estimation based on Gaussian function, so that the noisy, small thermal image sensor can be used. As experimental results of the proposed endoscopic photothermal therapy for the hepatophyma carcinoma model of rats, it turns out that the tumor temperature by which the heated tumor gets necrotic can be kept stable. It can be said that our endoscopic photothermal therapy achieves a certain degree of therapy effect.

This paper discusses jumping pattern generation for a serial link robot in order to maximize its jump height under torque limitation. By applying a genetic algorithm (GA) for determining torque assignment, we obtain various jumping patterns with respect to the torque limitation for a fixed mass of the robot. With the increase of the torque limitation, double-leg based jump, single-leg based jump, and spring-type jump are generated for achieving the largest jump height. Under an additional joint angle limitation, we also obtain an interesting solution where one end of the link is first lifted up and the other end finally kicks the ground strongly

We discuss the optimum design issue for tracing type legged robots in the sense that it can jump as high as possible. By applying dimensional analysis techniques, we introduce four non-dimensional parameters that control the jump ratio(= h/l) for a jumping robot. An interesting observation is that there exists the optimum design point where the jump ratio becomes maximum. Through experiments, we found that the robot with the optimum design specification can achieve the jump ratio of 3.6, while the jump ratio decreases for other design points.