In this paper, an artificial beating blood vessel model was constructed in order to reproduce the cardiovascular system with beating and to be embedded it in a medical phantom. The torque generated by the motor is proportional to the driving current, so the current was controlled to generate artificial beating blood flow. The constructed vascular model exhibited a first-order lag system in pulse pressure response corresponding to a step-like input current. Based on this result, a drive waveform that combined with function waveforms was created by a function generator, and the motor was driven through a current driver to generate blood flow due to artificial beating. The pulse response was obtained as a pressure change that occurs according to the flow of blood flow due to the generated artificial beating. The completed artificial beating vascular model showed the characteristics of the first-order lag system with the time constant 1.3s.

To execute efficient and precise handling tasks in micro world, a bilateral system which connects the micro and macro worlds in both directions has been developed. In order to improve the work efficiency, 3-dimensional observation of objects in the micro world is necessary. Two images with parallax are necessary for the 3-D observation, but it is difficult to obtain these images under a microscope. In addition, in order for the operator to presence an accurate operation, it is necessary to have an operation that is realistic and does not make the operator feel uncomfortable. In this research, we proposed a method of obtaining parallax images by inserting a glass plate under the microscope, tilting the plate and thus changing the optical path by a small distance. In addition, in order to electrically control the tilt of the glass plate, we developed a swinging actuator driven by voice coils. Furthermore, the characteristics of this device are measured and evaluated. In addition, the micro force plate is prototyped by us. This is a device that detects six-axis force from a three-axis tactile sensor. The values obtained from the devices actually created are summarized in a table and evaluated.

In this paper, in order to propose an interface that reproduces a thermal sensation, the skin temperature change when a human touches an object was measured, and temperature reproduction was performed using a Peltier device. The response and followability of the Peltier device were evaluated in experiments using objects with different thermal properties. The results showed that the heat transfer was generally terminated when the object is touched for about 10 seconds, and after that the temperature change was small. Furthermore, using the manufactured thermal sensation presentation device, we attempted to generate the wet sensation of a plurality of dry fabrics. The subjects evaluated the wet sensation of the initial temperature controlled the fabrics (dry or having a moisture content of 20-30%). As a result we concluded that the wet sensation can be generated when the initial temperature of the dry fabrics is lower than the skin temperature.

Detecting human is one of the most important functions of service robots assisting human lives. Thermal images are useful to detect human. Since the number of pixels of the thermal imagers is smaller than that of color imagers, thermal images get more useful combined with corresponding color images. In this paper, we propose a compact optical system to obtain both thermal and color images simultaneously. The key is to use a silicon-glass hybrid lens, with which visible and far-infrared light can be focused. The focused light was split by a silicon plate. The thermal and color images were taken by a thermal and color imager, respectively. We experimentally showed that the focal plane was tuned by the position of the lens keeping the correspondence of thermal and color images.

Many countries around the world face three major issues associated with their aging societies: a declining population, an increasing proportion of seniors, and an increasing number of single-person households. To explore assistive technologies that can help solve the problems faced by aging societies, we have tested several information and robot technologies. This paper introduces research on a home-assistant robot, which improves the ease and productivity of home activities. For people who work hard outside the home, the assistant robot performs chores in their home environment while they are away. A case study of a life-sized robot with a humanlike functional body performing daily chores is presented. An integrated software system incorporating modeling, recognition, and manipulation skills, as well as a motion generation approach based on the software system, is explained. Moreover, because housekeepers perform chores one after another in their daily environment, we also aim to develop a system for continuously performing a series of tasks by including failure detection and recovery.

In this paper, we propose a stretchable tactile sensor composed of a pair of silicone rubber channels filled with electro conductive liquid. When a force was applied to this channel, its length and cross-sectional area deforms. By measuring the resistance change of the electro conductive liquid in the channel, its deformation can be measured. The proposed tactile sensor is composed of two parallel channel filled with electro conductive liquid, therefore, by comparing the resistance changes of each channel to the deformation, only the contacting force can be measured independently. Since a liquid is used for the sensing material, the proposed liquid tactile sensor can be easily attached to movable portions as the joints of robots. In the paper, we measured the sensing characteristics of the liquid tactile sensor to the stretch, bend, and contact force. Finally, the efficiency of the sensor was demonstrated by measuring the contact force from 0 to 3.0N by attaching the 20% stretched liquid tactile sensor to curved surfaces with 0.05mm-1in curvature.

In this report, we proposed and fabricated a prototype tactile sensor with skin type structure to detect the object surface by scanning. The prototype sensor was composed of two different stiffness layers of elastomers as epidermis-dermis. Epidermal ridge and papillary ridge like structures are formed on a top layer of proposed structure. To measure its deformation, standing piezoresistive cantilevers are placed beside the papillary ridge. Since the papillary ridge deforms with the standing cantilever, it will causes unique deformation to the sensor. In this study, we confirmed the efficiency of the proposed tactile sensor with the scanning test of the object surface with grating. In the scanning test, contact angle of the sensor was related to its response. We verified the relationship between the contact angle and the sensor response and showed sensorpsilas efficiency for texture detection.

Three types of artificial butterfly wings were fabricated for investigating the morphological function of actual butterfly wings. They consist of a thin polymer membrane and micromolded polyurethane veins. The planar shape and venation of one type were the same as those of a swallowtail butterfly, and those of the other two were different. The effect of the distribution of stiffness over the wings by the veins on flight characteristics during free forward flight was investigated using an ornithopter and the three different types of wing. The overall aerodynamic coefficients were the highest for the wings with veins the same as those of a swallowtail butterfly, indicating that the veins enable slow forward flight.

We developed a very small and light butterfly-type ornithopter (BTO) to investigate butterfly flight. Its weight is 0.4 g, wing span is 140 mm and flapping frequency is 10 Hz. It flies forward passively. The flights were recorded with a highspeed video camera and the longitudinal motion of the BTO was analyzed. When the center of gravity was appropriate, the angle of attack of the body varied cyclically. We found that the cyclical change of the angle of attack produced total upward aerodynamic force. Then we visualized air flow around the BTO both in tethered flight and in free flight. We revealed that free body motion caused a stable attachment of leading edge vortex. We also found that the free body motion helped the wings' smooth upstroke, which was not found in tethered flight.

In speech transmission over asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks, ATM cell loss cannot be avoided. Over 0.1 percent of cell loss is detected by the human ear, and over 1 percent of cell loss degrades speech articulation. Therefore, the recovery of cell loss is necessary for the improvement of speech quality. For this improvement, several methods have been studied. However, they have problems of speech quality, the delay acceptable for ATM, or the computational and implementational complexity. Moreover, most of them were not evaluated in a realistic telecommunication environment. For speech quality improvement over ATM networks, a real-time high accurate cell loss recovery method is proposed, where a great simplification and large data reduction are achieved by introducing trinary waveforms and encoding. Evaluations in a realistic telecommunication environment show that the method sufficiently improves the speech quality (90-100 percent correct recovery of ATM cell loss, and 20-40 dB improvement of signal-to-noise ratio).

A novel image-based diagnostic method is proposed for an e-beam tester. In this method, a static-fault-imaging (SFI) technique and a navigation map for fault tracing are introduced. The SFI technique, in which a DC e-beam is used, enables fast acquisition of images without any additional hardware. Then, guided by the navigation map derived from CAD (computer-aided-design) data, marginal time faults can be easily pinpointed. The proposed method is applied to a 19 K-gate CMOS logic LSI circuit, and a marginal timing fault is located in about one-tenth the turn-around time of the conventional waveform-based method. It is concluded that this method should be very useful for the diagnosis of marginal faults related to supply voltage and temperature.>