This study presents an improved online/on-demand educational approach to engineering experiments by introducing an interactive 3D virtualized environment. This study aims to verify the possibility of the morphological evolution of fully online/on-demand engineering experiments by enabling the interactive operation of equipment and devices in a 3D virtual space. For this purpose, we developed an extended reality-based engineering experiment system that students can use through a web browser online/on-demand to conduct engineering experiments in a virtual space without requiring actual experimental equipment. By comparing the assessment results of the virtual experiments with on-campus real operation of equipment in the previous year, the educational effectiveness of introducing a virtualized environment that enables interactive online operation of 3D-modeled equipment on a web browser has been confirmed.

In this paper, the effectiveness of our approach for engineering education at an early stage is presented. It is designed for 15 or 16-year-old students who have just begun to take lectures for a specific specialized field of engineering in our college of technology. Here, how to encourage their learning motivation for various fields of engineering becomes important. Therefore, our program was designed by focusing on skills for communication, writing reports and making presentation through an engineering education practice as a project based learning by 4 or 5 students a group. The decision was made through discussion by the group unit. In order to check presence of the difference between generations, the investigation with a program of the same contents has been carried out for three years. By analyzing the answer to the questionnaire and impression in free form answering from 160 students in total every year for inspection of effectiveness, we conclude that our approach is effective not only for the enhancement of student's learning motivation in the engineering education program but their recognition for importance of the skill acquirement was confirmed.

Recently, demands for skillful engineers for developing higher application of embedded systems increase in the industry. In both universities and national colleges of technology, the higher education for embedded technology skill has been practiced in Japan. However, the systematization of the curriculum for embedded skill training is an item to be solved. Now, we are working on a project and developing skill standards with both educational contents and the new curriculum in cooperation with 10 national colleges of technology. Main objective of this project is to clarify what kinds of embedded skills should be learned and mastered in national colleges of technology. Here, skill standards have to be defined as a `skill sheet', and based on the standards, mastered skills by each student have to be visualized to encourage their learning motivation. In this paper, two parts are mainly outlined. One is how to design embedded technology skill standards. And the other is how to construct the skill management system to guarantee student's skill level for embedded technology.

We are developing an advanced 3D vision system VVV (Versatile Volumetric Vision) which can be used for many purposes in many fields; robotics, medical and welfare, CAD, VR, etc. The basic processes of 3D vision are range sensing of a 3D scene, describing 3D shape of objects in the scene, and recognizing the 3D position and orientation of objects by matching with object models. Also, moving objects can be tracked by repeating these processes. For the system to be versatile, it consistently executes these processes and makes no assumption on objects; objects may be any size, any shape (figures, polyhedra to free forms), covered with textured or glossy surfaces, at any position, in any direction, together with other objects, and partially occluded by them. The basic technical approach is structural analysis and partial pattern matching. And, the basic policy of development is to separate "functions" which are common to all tasks and "knowledges" which are specific to each task.

We present a novel design and implementation of a foveated wide angle lens. It is strongly motivated towards applications for active vision in complex and dynamic environments. The projection curve is designed so that it facilitates active vision algorithms for motion analysis, object identification, and precise fixation. The implementation achieves small size and light weight so that the lens can be swung at a high speed.

There is a new approach to define objects qualitatively and hierarchically by generic shapes (we call them primitives) arranged by generic relations so that a class of objects has the same description and to recognize them in a parallel and bottom-up way in the image. This paper presents a method to find a skewed symmetrical pattern in the image as a higher-order primitive which is defined by lower-order primitives such as line segments, curved segments, or the pairs of segments arranged by the relation skewed symmetry since a bilaterally symmetrical figure on an arbitrarily oriented plane viewed under orthographic projection yields a skewed symmetrical figure whose axes of symmetry and skew constrain the orientation of the underlying plane. The proposed method can detect the accurate skewed symmetrical axes of not only polygonal patterns but also curved patterns in a complex image even if some parts of the patterns are occluded.>

The authors extend the algorithm for stereo vision on a mobile robot in a unstructured environment to generate the 3-D b-rep of the large environment by incrementally integrating local and incomplete stereo data. The stereo vision is based on the 2-D b-reps of stereo images. The 2-D b-rep is a 2-D version of the 3-D b-rep to describe an image; the image is represented in a hierarchy of regions, boundaries, and line-segments. The b-rep is obtained for each of stereo images and the two images are matched on this data structure. The direct output of stereo is 3-D wireframes, a set of 3-D loops (boundaries) composed of 3-D line-segments, of the scene. A unique surface is then defined for each loop to make the 3-D b-rep, the consistent geometrical model, of the scene. It is necessary for the mobile robot to change views of the scene to make uninterpretable loops interpretable by finding missing segments, and thus make the complete b-rep of the scene.>

The problem of detecting occluding and ridge edges is solved for objects with planar surfaces, using stereo vision that is based on directional boundary segments of regions in a pair of stereo images. Methods are proposed to detect occlusions in which occluding edges are explicitly identified: to classify the other unidentified edges as either occluding or ridge edges, using the explicitly occluding edges to classify ridge edges further as convex, concave, or flat (paint or shadow) edges, based on the surface normals of both sides of the edges; and to classify the space of the scene into free, occupied, or uninterpretable real surfaces.>