In the case of conventional industrial robot systems, operators have to write robot-language programs for each type of workpiece. This is an onerous task, especially when each workpiece has a different shape. We propose a teaching-less robot system for the finishing of two-dimensional workpieces of various shapes and thicknesses using force control and computer vision. The robot system does not require shape information for the workpiece to be included in the CAD data or to be input by the operator. Each workpiece shape is acquired by segmenting edges into straight lines and circular arcs from the image data of the workpiece. The robot-language program for each workpiece is generated automatically from the workpiece shape data and finishing condition data. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments using a newly developed robot system. In the system, the robot picks up a workpiece whose shape is not previously known on the workpiece stand by itself and carries out the finishing tasks using the automatically generated robot-language program. This method provides a compact and inexpensive finishing robot system which reduces the programming and workpiece-setting burden on the operators.

We developed a robot system which can play one-on-one volleyball games with a human player. It can not only hit a flying ball back to the player correctly but also have various autonomous functionalities to interact with humans necessary for playing games, i.e., it can pick up a ball of a requested color by recognizing voice instructions, can locate the players by recognizing their faces, and can shake hands. This robot performed the entire game sequence over 100 times at a company-sponsored exhibition, where the ball rally continued over 25 times with an arbitrary player. In this paper, we mainly describe the real-time visual feedback system of the robot which is essential for playing ball games.

We present the concept that for uniformly rotated images, the optimal approximation of the images can be obtained by computing the basis vectors for the discrete cosine transform (DCT) of the original image in polar coordinates, and that the images can be represented as linear combinations of the basis vectors.

We present a fast pattern matching algorithm with a large set of templates. The algorithm is based on the typical template matching speeded up by the dual decomposition; the Fourier transform and the Karhunen-Loeve transform. The proposed algorithm is appropriate for the search of an object with unknown distortion within a short period. Patterns with different distortion differ slightly from each other and are highly correlated. The image vector subspace required for effective representation can be defined by a small number of eigenvectors derived by the Karhunen-Loeve transform. A vector subspace spanned by the eigenvectors is generated, and any image vector in the subspace is considered as a pattern to be recognized. The pattern matching of objects with unknown distortion is formulated as the process to extract the portion of the input image, find the pattern most similar to the extracted portion in the subspace, compute normalized correlation between them at each location in the input image, and find the location with the best score. Searching for objects with unknown distortion requires vast computation. The formulation above makes it possible to decompose highly correlated reference images into eigenvectors, as well as to decompose images in frequency domain, and to speed up the process significantly.

A new master-slave manipulator (MSM) with different configurations and different degrees of freedom (DOF) has been developed. It consists of a general master arm using pantograph mechanisms and a seven degree of freedom slave arm with a redundant joint. Symmetric bilateral control using a virtual internal model and redundant arm control with a singular configuration are used to improve the maneuverability of the MSM. The developed MSM has been confirmed to have good maneuverability from basic experiments. This paper describes the mechanisms, control methods, and experimental results of the MSM.