In robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery, the remote center of motion (RCM) achieves precision and safe manipulation of surgical devices through the insertion point into the patient’s body. One of the RCM configurations, one-rotation and one-translation (1R1T) RCM based on a closed-loop design, enables two-degrees-of-freedom transmission from the proximal end of the robotic arm to the distal end. This feature offers important advantages, particularly in enhancing safety by minimizing physical contact risks with patients or other surgical tools owing to the simplified layout near the surgical field. However, conventional 1R1T RCM robots typically employ complex structures with numerous joints consisting of pin-and-hole mating mechanisms. This complexity can increase the overall size of the robot and compromise motion precision. This study presents a miniature 1R1T precision manipulator with RCM, ORIGANOID (dimensions: W60 x D120 x H30 mm, weight: 12.6 g). The robotic arm features flexure hinges, eliminates clearance issues, and can be fabricated using an origami-inspired robotic approach. Furthermore, using a novel backlash-free coupling method, the robotic arm could be easily attached and detached from the drive units. A prototype was fabricated and experimentally validated. The results demonstrated that high-resolution motion could be achieved within 10 μm. Furthermore, a demonstration using an eyeball model confirmed the successful implementation of 1R1T RCM.

Information technology has been advancing in many countries. In their daily lives, people encounter computerized systems in many situations and often take their operation for granted. If a system failure occurs temporarily, it is disadvantageous for the system operator and the user. The use of distributed and parallel processing systems has increased the prevalence of software failures due to resource sharing among processes. The purpose of this study is to verify the presence or absence of deadlock by using the validator called FDR for the processes of the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3 robot while it climbs stairs.

In dealing with medical information of patients through the network, high-level security is required. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has issued the Security Guidelines for Health Information Systems which stipulates that proper measures should be taken for the network to preserve the patient data. The guideline also state that the management of the network must clarify demarcation of responsibility between network service providers including user. To keep the security regulation in communicating with external organizations, many medical institutions use several managed-VPN service lines separately according to the usages. It is because to avoid the risk of forming a virtual detour which can be used to leak the patient data. This makes the hospital bear the cost and inconvenience. To solve this problem, we propose a new secure network implementation method using single-line VPN network service for small-scale medical institution by arranging OpenFlow control technology with Healthcare PKI. The network works over a dynamic on-demand VPN with control based on the user certification responding their qualification, such as a medical doctor, written in the HPKI digital certificates. We developed a simple network system adopting our new method, and confirmed the validity and the effectiveness of our idea through the experiment.

Ad-Hoc networks have become increasingly popular and they can provide mobile users with ubiquitous communication capability and information access regardless of locations. Presently, there are many research works and applications of Ad-Hoc networks. However, in order to achieve the ubiquitous services new platforms and methods are needed. In this paper, we propose the Real Object-Oriented Communication (ROOC) method and implement a middleware for Ad-Hoc networks based on ROOC and P2P concepts. The proposed middleware can provide the ubiquitous services and the applications for Ad-Hoc networks can be developed efficiently. We evaluate the proposed platform by some evaluation results and we show its effectiveness.

This paper proposes a speech recognition technique based on acoustic models considering voice characteristic variations. Context-dependent acoustic models, which are typically triphone HMM, are often used in continuous speech recognition systems. This work hypothesizes that the speaker voice characteristics that humans can perceive by listening are also factors in acoustic variation for construction of acoustic models, and a tree-based clustering technique is also applied to speaker voice characteristics to construct voice-characteristic-dependent acoustic models. In speech recognition using triphone models, the neighboring phonetic context is given from the linguistic-phonetic knowledge in advance; in contrast, the voice characteristics of input speech are unknown in recognition using voice-characteristic-dependent acoustic models. This paper proposes a method of recognizing speech even under conditions where the voice characteristics of the input speech are unknown. The result of a gender-dependent speech recognition experiment shows that the proposed method achieves higher recognition performance in comparison to conventional methods.

Software aging often affects the performance of a software system and eventually causes it to fail. A novel approach to handle transient software failures is called software rejuvenation which can be regarded as a preventive and proactive solution that is particularly useful for counteracting the phenomenon of software aging. In this paper, we consider the optimal software rejuvenation policy maximizing the interval reliability in the general semi-Markov framework. We derive analytically the optimal software rejuvenation timing which maximizes the limiting interval reliability or the interval reliability with exponentially distributed operation times. Further, we examine numerically the transient behavior of the interval reliability at an arbitrary operation time. Our results under the interval reliability criteria are extentions of some earlier work, since the interval reliability can be specialized to the pointwise availability and the common reliability function.