This paper introduces a novel form of communication via a combination of muscle sensing by electromyography and stimulation via a skin-stretcher device as a motion monitoring system. After sensing muscle activity through electromyography, the skin-stretcher device provides a skin sensation that confidentially informs or induces movements of the user who wears the device. This paper also introduces methods for translating muscle activities to the skin-stretch sensations, and additional filtering to improve the performance. In this study, we conducted preliminary experiments that demonstrate the potential of our system design.

The paper aims at stimulating a discussion on the prospect and potentiality of open source electronic design automation tools and open source hardware. We discuss the benefits and motivation, as well as the expected difficulties and shortcomings. Finally, we provide a representative list of efforts as of today specifically for analog and mixed-signal circuits and systems design and prototyping.

We consider that ultrasonic waves can be used not only for measuring the distance to a target but also for comprehending what the target is simultaneously. We assumed that the physical characteristics of a target object (especially, surface information) are embedded in the power spectrum structure of the ultrasonic waves reflected from the target. The results of our investigation to analyze the characteristics of the power spectrum structure of waves reflected from various kinds of target materials showed whether target objects are soft and deformable or hard and undeformable.

Various wearable computing devices face problems with their power supplies, communication channels, and placement. Conductive clothes can resolve these problems, but it is still difficult to know the positions of devices on the conductive fabric. Therefore, we have devised a method to detect the positions of such devices by using a camera. To detect the positions our method blinks the LEDs on the devices according to their ID. Additionally, we propose several methods to shorten the time for detection. An experimental evaluation confirmed that compared with conventional method our methods reduce the time to detect the positions of the devices.

According to the drastic development of computers and network systems, a new paradigm of computing system, the wearable computing systems is recently widely studied[l, 21. Users can install the devices, such as computers, sensors and displays, on their wear, and the integrated system of these devices enables the novel usage of computing.

An integration of the signal processing circuits with the image acquiring device, which is called the vision chip and can process information in parallel, is proposed for fast image processing. In applications for robot vision, not only the detailed information, such as shape or texture, but also the rough information, such as 'something is around here', are important and useful. We consider the detecting of centroids of objects in the focal plain as the rough vision processing, which is useful in practical application, and describe its implementation using two components; the centroid detector and the coordinate generator. First, we describe the fast flag generation algorithm indicating the centroid of objects, and its implementation using an analog parallel signal processing architecture. Next, we describe a novel encoding algorithm for flag positions indicating the centroids in order to obtain their coordinates.

The Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is an international joint project to promote science and technology in intelligent robotics, AI and related fields with the specific goal of building a fully humanoid robot that can be the human world cup champion by 2050, and to apply technologies developed in this activity to socially significant issues such as rescue, and for next generation industries. This idea inspired the imagination of people and it has grown to be one of the largest research areas in multi-agent robotics. The paper discusses extension of RoboCup activity for education and edutainment. Specifically, RoboCup has initiated a new project called RoboCup Jr. that aims at promotion of engineering education and popularization of robotics using RoboCup. A RoboCup Jr. league will be created to meet diverse needs of the education field, and a series of organizational frameworks are proposed to develop a network of social, personal, educational, and technical infrastructures to assist those who are interested in RoboCup Jr. activity.