In this paper, we derive a finite-time positioning controller for an ultrasonic motor based on homogeneous control Lyapunov functions and stochastic stability analysis. In theory, finite-time stabilizers are useful for accelerating a settling time neighborhood of a target position. However, in practical experiments, the stabilizers cause chattering-like phenomena around the target position. In this paper, we treat the chattering-like phenomena as Gaussian white noises appearing around the target position in order to construct a new compensator for them by using stochastic stability analysis. In the procedure for achieving practical experiments, we construct a state-space model for an ultrasonic motor control system by analyzing step responses, design a homogeneous finite-time controller, and propose a compensator of the chattering-like phenomena caused by the controller. Then, we confirm the availability of the compensator via the investigation of the simulation and experimental results.

As the aging problem in Japan becomes more and more severe, there are requirements for labor and resources to take care of elders. For lightening the burden of care workers in safety confirmation of elders in daily life, systems to confirm safety of elders attract a lot of attentions in recent years. This paper reports a safety confirmation system for elders. In the proposed system, for detecting the motion of elders, the system employing Obrid-Sensor and ultrasonic sensor is reported for safety confirmation of elders in restroom. The applications of Obrid-Sensor and ultrasonic sensors ensured the motion detection with privacy protection. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by experiments.

As aging society problem goes severe, systems to confirm to safety of elders in daily life are expected to relieve burdensome safety confirmation tasks of care workers. In this paper, a sensor, which detects person localization without privacy offending, applying Obrid-Sensor is proposed. In the proposed design, the Obrid-Sensor is constructed with a line sensor and a slit to obtain one-dimensional brightness distribution. The proposed sensor is able to obtain one-dimensional brightness distribution that is approximately equal to integration value of each vertical pixel line of two-dimensional image. Meanwhile, the novel slit type Obrid-Sensor, which was constructed without Rod lens, is studied in this research. By employing the proposed sensor, the information of a subject's position and motion can be obtained without using two-dimensional texture image. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by experiments.

Ultrasonic motor (USM) is a novel kind of electronic motor which employs friction as its drive source. Owing to attractive features of USMs, they are expected to be applied widely in industrial world. However, in the applications of USMs, control performances are limited by characteristic variation and nonlinearity of USMs. To overcome the problems, many control methods have been proposed in previous research. In this paper, a scheme of internal model control (IMC)-PID control combined with particle swarm optimization (PSO) type neural network (NN) is studied for control of USM. In the method, an NN controller is designed for adjusting the control parameter in IMC-PID controller. Meanwhile, the weights of NN are updated by PSO algorithm on-line. By employing the proposed method, the characteristic changes and nonlinearity of USM can be ompensated. On the other hand, the application of PSO algorithm in NN's learning avoids the problem of Jacobian estimation in conventional NNs which apply back-propagation (BP) method. The effectiveness of the method is confirmed by experiments.

Bedridden persons who have the inconvenient hands, legs and mouth can tell his/her will to a nurse by only opening and shutting his/her eyelids. Hence a medical care support system for such persons to become to be able to communicate to other people has been desired. In this paper, a system to automatically estimate opening and shutting of an eyelid from a sequence of real images which are taken by CCD camera has been developed.

This paper investigates the performance of a handwritten character recognition method by hierarchical displacement extraction based on NIST special database (HSF7). The method is composed of a displacement extraction technique and a coarse-to-fine search strategy. In the displacement extraction technique, the displacement (correspondence) between an input pattern and a prototype is iteratively computed by minimizing a functional defined in the framework of regularization theory. In the coarse-to-fine search strategy, the above-mentioned displacement is determined with multiresolution images so as to avoid the pitfalls of local minimum and make the number of iterations low. In addition, a new idea is proposed for reducing the cost of computation without degrading the recognition performance, in which the number of candidate prototypes is eliminated gradually through the hierarchical procedure of the coarse-to-fine search strategy.

This paper presents a distributed algorithm for optimization of nonconvex multimodal functions. In recent years, new distributed algorithms based on artificial life (ALife) system has been studied and its potential power has been demonstrated. In this paper, the frame work of ALife system is employed into a function minimization. We also propose a hybrid algorithm in which ALife system is incorporated with the local search method for finding good start points for the local search. Since the proposed method utilizes no gradient information it can be applied to very wide class of optimization problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through some numerical tests.

In the future, it is expected that robots will play important roles in coexisting with humans. Whenever humans come into contact with these robots they must be able to adjust their physical softness parameters, which will help humans remain calm and which will be favourable for human emotions. Therefore, it is desirable for robots to control their impedance characteristics in such cases. From these points of view, desirable values of the impedance parameters of robots are investigated in this paper through a rating scale method. In terms of the results, the emotions felt by humans with regard to the robots being soft, pleasant and human-like are explained by a linear regression model of the impedance values, and the emotions of being reassuring are classified into four groups.