Concepts and necessity of a dummy (human model) which can simulate a disaster victim for the purpose of evaluating rescue equipments including robots and rescue skills of human and robots are proposed. By contrast of conventional dummies in various fields, the concrete requirements are made clear. The plan of research and development project based on the concept is described. In the latter part of this paper, the 1st prototype under development is introduced. It is based on a human model (doll) for training of bathing assistance, and is equipped with 8-channel telemetric sensors, a wireless camera, a voice recorder, a heater vest, and a carbon dioxide gas tank.

Close circumnavigation is an important function indispensable for servicing satellites. We discuss the bielliptic flyaround maneuver by impulsive thrust control for a small and low cost servicing satellite flying around a target satellite. An optimal feedback control scheme for the thrust is proposed to maintain this trajectory in the presence of disturbances. The extended Kalman filter is employed to estimate state variables which are not available for measurement. Simulation results that verify the trajectory keeping capability of the proposed thrust control are presented.

The Japanese Government plans to hold the International Robot Games Festival in 2001, which is called "RoboFesta 2001". The RoboFesta 2001 will be held both in the Osaka area and Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan, and will consist of several authoritative robot games, an international forum, and lots of robot-related exhibitions during the summer and autumn in 2001. The article describes the aims and organisation of the festival, then describes the various games.

In order for a robotic system autonomously to capture an unknown rigid body rotating freely in zero gravity, it is necessary for it to detect the object's motion. This paper presents a method for estimating object motion based on position information concerning a point located on the object's surface. We assume that the object's motion is described by the superposition of the rotations with constant angular velocities. When position sensors, etc., can obtain three dimensional position information about a point on the object, we can estimate parameters describing its motion. In other words, using this method we can calculate each frequency and direction of the axes of rotation by applying a Fourier transform to a time sequence of the point's three dimensional position.

This paper presents a method to estimate and to predict general three-dimensional motions of an unknown rigid body under no external forces and moments using visual information, which is applicable to autonomous space robotic missions. Four parameters of dynamics and a reference coordinate frame to describe the motion are computed based on the Euler's equation of motion from a sequence of angular velocity vectors extracted from difference of images. Through computer simulations for various kinds of motions the effectiveness and limitation of this method are discussed.>

Although visual servoing is suitable for control of a mobile robot based on a single on-board camera image, wheeled vehicles have a non-holonomic property that the degree of freedom of the input is less than that of the configuration. Thus the visual servoing can not be directly applied to a camera system fixed on the vehicle. Furthermore there is no smooth and stable state feedback law for non-holonomic vehicles. To overcome these difficulties, the authors consider another situation, that the pan angle of camera is actuated and used as an input of visual servoing. The desired state is given as not a constant value but a trajectory represented in terms of image sequences of a gazed object. Based on this idea, the authors propose a method of realizing "teaching and playback" for a non-holonomic mobile robot. In the teaching mode, the robot tracks a landmark in the environment by a single on-board camera and stores its image sequences while running commanded by a human operator. In the playback mode, the robot tracks the desired trajectory with velocity commands for the vehicle and the pan angle for the camera determined from the stored and current images. The authors discuss the convergence to a desired state and moreover point out an additional feedback term, of a deviation of the pan angle works to improve the tracking performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by illustrating computer simulation results.>

We describe our approach to the robotic Hanetsuki task (Japanese badminton), that is, to return the incoming shuttlecock to the human's side with a racket. A learning method using a novel database is proposed to compensate for the insufficiency in a model-based approach. Experimental results obtained with the developed Hanetsuki robot are presented.>

We propose an algorithm that esti- mates tumbling motions of unknown rigid bodies un- der no gravitation based on visual information. Ge- ometric analysis enables determining four parameters of dynamics and reference coordinates from the se- quence of angular velocity vectors which are extracted from difference of images. Computer simulations con- sidering quantization errors show the effectiveness of algorithm.

Discusses robot motion planning in dynamic environment, that is, generation of a motion pattern to attain a working purpose. The authors examine the relation between this redundancy and the dynamic dexterity of robots. Especially the authors focus on 'juggling' as a typical example of such a working purpose(task). To juggle several balls in the gravitational field, the motion of the robot is determined considering the dynamic property of balls. It is shown that a parametric representation of the robot motion makes it easy to generate an appropriate trajectory of the end-effector for 'juggling task'.>

The positioning control problem of the end tips of space manipulators which have no fixed bases is investigated. According to the momentum-conservation law, the system is represented by a nonholonomic model. Thus, the conventional control method for industrial robots, based on a local feedback at each joint, is not applicable when the end tip must be positioned at a floating target. For this problem, the sensory feedback control scheme is based on the artificial potential defined in the sensor coordinate frame. The generalized Jacobian plays an important role in determining the control torque of each joint from the data of the external sensors. This scheme is simple, and the stability of the system is strictly assured. The approximate Jacobian, which needs less computation and less parameter identification, is shown to work well.>