Prosthetic hands with multiple degrees of freedom are aesthetically pleasing and capable of selecting prehensile forms. However, the hands are not fully useful in daily living activities which is caused by the lack of design consideration of hand-arm coordination within tasks. A functional hand design priority should be based on evidence gained from observation and analysis on the coordination of reach and grasp motions of target objects. In this research, daily hand activities were recorded with body mounted video camera and analyzed to confirm the cadence of grasp used. Furthermore, the grasping direction was analyzed regarding the relative coordination of the two 3-dimensional coordinate systems: trunk and forearm coordinate systems. As result, the highest contribution ratio of grasping in the forearm coordinate was 23.1%. Next, based on the normalized frequency of each grasping direction, the contribution rate were investigated, in the case of having two grasping directions and the case of the grasping direction changes by the rotation function. As a result, if the grasping direction is single, the highest contribution rate was 42.6% when adding wrist motion. In condition where terminal device has two grasping directions, the highest contribution rate was 87.2% when adding pronation/supination. Calculating the contribution rate of deskwork, hook shape was 87.2%, hand shape was 49.4%. This difference suggests that there is an influence of the grasping direction, in addition to the shape of the fingers.

This paper describes the development of a whole-body robotic simulator of an elderly person for evaluating robotics devices for nursing care. To improve the quality of life of the elderly persons, physical assistance such as transfer, movement, and bathroom assistance is important. It is also important to reduce the workload of caregivers in an aging society. In recent years, assistive robotic devices for nursing care have been developed and commercialized for such purposes. However, such devices have not become popular in the care facilities yet. One of the reasons is that it is still difficult to evaluate the effects of the devices on the care receivers and caregivers. In particular, it is necessary to quantitatively evaluate the effect of the devices on the human body from the viewpoint of safety and comfort. We have developed a whole-body robotic system to simulate the pose and motion of the elderly persons. The purpose of this system is to realize quantitative physical evaluation of robotics devices for nursing care of the human body. The experimental results of the preliminary evaluation of assistive robotic devices are also presented.

This paper reports the results of a survey on introducing robots and other new technologies to care services, such as care for older adults. Demographic data show that the ratio of older adults in Japan has already exceeded 23.3%. Japan also is facing a severe shortage of the working-age population, which could lead to a reduction in the quality of care services for older adults; therefore, robots and the provision of new forms of information technologies are expected to be utilized in such care services. The purpose of this study is to help facilitate the introduction of novel technologies in care services, such as in long-term care facilities. We focus on information-related costs that are incurred prior to the purchase of technologies such as attending exhibitions and conducting Internet searches. This report shows the results of an investigation into such information-related costs for three different products, and discusses the importance of the appropriate management of information costs from the development phase through to the introduction phase of such products.

Motion analysis of human body is indispensable for design and evaluation of assistive technologies. Especially, on-site analyses, which are conducted not in experimental environments but in life circumstances, are important to develop truly beneficial assistive technologies. We developed a portable motion tracking system using high-accuracy AR markers. It enables easy measurement of 6-DOF (six degrees of freedom) motion of multiple tracking points by a single camera. The pose estimation errors are about 5 [mm] in location (depth) and about 2 [deg] in orientation. We applied the prototype of the motion tracker to the on-site motion analysis tasks, and demonstrated its availability in the evaluation of assistive technologies.

This paper presents a basic study on feasibility of usage of humanoid robots as an evaluator of assistive devices, by taking advantage of its anthropomorphic shape. In this new application humanoid are expected to help evaluation through quantitative measures, which is difficult with human subjects, and also to reduce the burden coming from ethical concerns with costly tests by human subjects. Taking a passive supportive wear “Smart Suit Lite” designed to relieve the load at lower back as an example, we have conducted pilot experiments by using the humanoid robot HRP-4C. The motion to be performed by the humanoid is obtained through retargeting technique from measured human lifting motion. The supportive effect is first estimated by simulation taking into account the mechanism of the supportive device. The experimentation of humanoid hardware brought us encouraging results on the basic feasibility of this application, as we observed a clear decrease of the torque for lifting when wearing the device as expected by the simulation.

This paper describes the GRD (Genetic Reconfiguration of DSPs) chip, which is evolvable hardware designed for neural network applications. The GRD chip is a building block for the configuration of a scalable neural network hardware system. Both the topology and the hidden layer node functions of a neural network mapped on the GRD chips are dynamically reconfigured using a genetic algorithm (GA). Thus, the most desirable network topology and choice of node functions (e.g., Gaussian or sigmoid function) for a given application can be determined adaptively. This approach is particularly suited to applications requiring the ability to cope with time-varying problems and real-time constraints. The GRD chip consists of a 100 MHz 32-bit RISC processor and 15 33 MHz 16-bit DSPs connected in a binary-tree network. The RISC processor is the NEC V830 which executes mainly the GA. According to chromosomes obtained by the GA, DSP functions and the interconnection among them are dynamically reconfigured. The GRD chip does not need a host machine for this reconfiguration. This is desirable for embedded systems in practical industrial applications. Simulation results on chaotic time series prediction are two orders of magnitude faster than on a Sun Ultra 2.

In contrast to conventional hardware where the structure is irreversibly fixed in the design process, evolvable hardware (EHW) is designed to adapt to changes in task requirements or changes in the environment, through its ability to reconfigure its own hardware structure dynamically and autonomously. This capacity for adaptation, achieved by employing efficient search algorithms based on the metaphor of evolution, has great potential for the development of innovative industrial applications. This paper introduces EHW chips and six applications currently being developed as part of MITI's Real-World Computing Project; an analog EHW chip for cellular phones, a clock-timing architecture for Giga hertz systems, a neural network EHW chip capable of autonomous reconfiguration, a data compression EHW chip for electrophotographic printers, and a gate-level EHW chip for use in prosthetic hands and robot navigation.

Group foraging and colonial formation in avian species are examined with an artificial life (alife) model using genetic algorithms (GA) and neural networks. Horn's classical model predicts that colonial birds are more successful than territorial ones in a patchy resource environment, and the reverse is true when resources are evenly distributed. The weak point of the model is confusion between colony formation and flock foraging and implicit assumption of perfect knowledge of resource distribution by foraging birds. The authors made an alife model that realized both flock foraging and colonial formation simultaneously during evolution in a patchy environment. The reference organisms were egrets, which make colonial nests in the breeding season and colonial roosts in the nonbreeding season. In the computer model, artificial egrets used the presence of other egrets as an indicator to locate resource-rich patches in a resource-clumped environment. On the contrary, egrets were less reliant on other individuals as a source of foraging information in evenly distributed resource conditions. Colonial nesting was also induced only in a patchy environment where the foraging efficiency was always higher than the evenly distributed condition. Local enhancement played an important role in achieving colonial and flock foraging.