The authors have been developing anthropomorphic head-eye robots, in order to elucidate the human vision system from an engineering point of view, and to develop a new head mechanism and function for a humanoid robot having the ability to communicate naturally with a human. We developed the anthropomorphic head-eye robot "WE-3RII" (Waseda Eye No.3 Refined II), with eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, lips, jaw and a neck. The robot has the ability to express an autonomous facial expression using three independent parameters of a psychological model. With the robot, the mechanism of changing eye movement from smooth pursuit eye movement to saccadic, and the control of scanning eye movement like that of a human's can be achieved. The robot is also able to express more human-like motion in pursuing a target by changing its eyeball control parameters, rather than that of WE-3R which we developed in 1996. Therefore, the authors have confirmed that WE-3RII has the ability to realize a pursuing motion in three dimensional space with its autonomous facial expression adapting to the target position and brightness like a human.

In this study the authors are developing anthropomorphic head-eye robots, in order to elucidate the human vision system from an engineering point of view, and to develop a new communication system with humans. We have developed an anthropomorphic head-eye robot with 2-DOF eyes and a 4-DOF head rotation mechanism, WE-3 (Waseda Eye No.3), that comprises a subsystem of an anthropomorphic robot 'Hadaly-2' which we are developing in 'Humanoid Project' at Waseda University. Since the camera drive mechanism need light-weight and immune to backlashes, the eyeball part uses a tendon-driven gimbal mechanism. The neck part except yaw axis is also driven by tendon-driven mechanism. In this experiment, the target is a electric light bulb. The head-eye robot, WE-3 has realized coordinated head-eye motion with VOR (vestibulo-ocular reflex) of human, and pursuing motion in the depth direction using the angle of convergence, with the same speed as humans.

The authors develop an anthropomorphic head-eye robot, in order to elucidate the human vision system from an engineering point of view and to develop a new communication system with humans. The robot developed, Waseda Eye 3 (WE-3), has 2-DOF eyes and a 4-DOF head rotation mechanism and comprises of the anthropomorphic robot 'Hadaly-2', developed at the Waseda University, as a subsystem. Since the camera drive mechanism needs light-weight and immune to backlashes, the eyeball part uses a tendon-driven gimbal mechanism. The neck part, except the yaw axis, is also driven by tendon-driven mechanism. In this experiment, the target used is a electric light bulb. The WE-3 head-eye robot realized a coordinated head-eye motion similar to the vestiburo-ocular reflex of human, and pursued motion in the depth direction using the angle of convergence, with the same speed as humans.

A mastication robot is a jaw motion simulator that has similar structure and function to the human masticatory system. This paper describes an optimal reduction of the jaw joint force focusing on the fan shape of the musculus temporalis (M.temporalis) spreading around the side of skull. The shape of M.temporalis is simplified as two independent lines, and the jaw joint force is computed by using linear programming. Furthermore the actuators corresponding to the anterior and posterior parts of M.temporalis are assigned separately. The 28% reduction of jaw joint force was confirmed experimentally by using robot.>