The International Space Station (ISS) crew has to complete various tasks in a limited time. The Int-Ball project is one of the activities aimed at the efficient utilization of crew time. Int-Ball2 is an autonomous mobile robot that conducts imaging operations in place of crew members by remote control from the ground. This paper first introduces the design of the guidance, navigation and control (GNC) and propulsion systems of Int-Ball2, offering autonomous flight inside the ISS. This robot has unique features compared to other free-flying robots in space, including its small size for use in crowded environments and its high thrust despite its size. In addition, the navigation system uses a visual SLAM algorithm, which does not rely on external markers. The results of orbital performance verification tests for 6-DOF translational and rotational motion are also presented in this paper. Our analysis indicated that the proposed GNC algorithm provided sufficient performance to conduct the required photography. Finally, the results of ground tests simulating the microgravity environment are compared with the results of orbital experiments to evaluate the differences in the robot’s mobility performance in these tests. The results confirmed that the ground verification method was valid for achieving stable on-orbit mobility.

The autonomous operation of robots in the International Space Station (ISS) is required to maximize the use of limited resources and enable astronauts to concentrate more on valuable tasks. To achieve these goals, we are developing a station where the robot approaches, docks, charges, and then undocks. In this paper, the authors propose a magnetic docking mechanism for free-flying robots with spherical surfaces that makes it possible for a robot to dock securely without requiring highly precise guidance, navigation and control capability. By making use of a slider guide and repelling pairs of magnets, this mechanism can achieve tolerance for larger robot position error as compared with the conventional fixed guide mechanism. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively enlarge the acceptable error range of poses, and also reduce acceleration at the moment of impact. We also introduce a model to predict the success or failure of docking from the contact condition of the robot and the guide by using a machine learning technique - Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). The prediction results shows that the learnt model can express the contact condition of successful docking.

Precise Point Positioning (PPP) offers advantages over Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning in that it needs no ground base station or a rover to provide a communication channel with the base station. Therefore, PPP is expected to be applied in various fields, such as precise agriculture, intelligent transportation, construction, and mining. One major drawback of PPP is that it takes several tens of minutes for initial convergence to reach an adequate level of accuracy, and how to shorten the convergence time remains the key issue regarding the proliferation of PPP. In our previous work, we proposed a method of drastically reducing this initial convergence time of PPP (called “ARIADNE”) by using an accurate fiducial marker whose position in Earth-fixed coordinates has been accurately measured using an onboard camera. In this contribution, in order to improve both the positioning accuracy and reliability, we introduce some new techniques to ARIADNE: (1) carrier phase ambiguity resolution (AR); and (2) estimating displacement of the marker's orientation. AR results in doubling the positioning accuracy, while displacement estimation enables the detection of any change in the marker's installation orientation and compensation for the effect thereof in the initialization process. Analytical results based on actual data acquired with a prototype system show that the above method and techniques work very well with a realistic setup of PPP-AR and marker performance, and successfully reduce the initial convergence time from tens of minutes to less than a minute.

Uncertainty can appear in all aspects of software development: uncertainty in requirements analysis, design decisions, implementation and testing. If uncertainty can be dealt with modularly, we can add or delete uncertain concerns to/from models, code and tests whenever these concerns arise or are fixed to certain concerns. To deal with this problem, we developed iArch-U, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for managing uncertainty modularly in all phases in software development. In this paper, we introduce an overview of iArch-U. The iArch-U IDE is open source software and can be downloaded from GitHub.

The authors proposed a methodology of assisting the patients who were suffering from mobility impairment of finger and thumb joints, with exoskeletal devices. The types of exoskeletal assistive devices for such patients were categorized into several groups based on required functions which are derived from the patients' condition. One of the categories, "joint motion compensator" is a novel concept taking into consideration the difference between active-ROM (range of motion) and passive-ROM of joints, and with regard to one of subgroups of this category called "joint motion amplifier", a prototype device which amplifies the motion of index-finger PIP (proximal interphalangeal) joint was constructed and verification experiments for pinching objects were conducted. The results revealed that it was feasible to pick up and pinch objects which were not so small or thin enough to be picked without nails, and also was possible for the device to hold such objects as strongly as human hands do.

This paper presents a mobile robotic system designed to perform deep soil sampling for lunar subsurface exploration in the near future. Drilling robots have to carry the excavated regolith backward because of its high density. Therefore a new scheme is proposed, to move forward under the soil by making use of reactive force caused by pushing the discharged regolith. Simple experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The VCore(*) based Design Methodology developed in the VCDS(**) project is a novel design methodology utilizing VCores. VCores are reusable functional cores defined at high level. We designed a SoC for Wearable Computer as a vehicle application in the pilot project (Figure 1), and compared our proposed methodology with a conventional RTL based design methodology by measuring the design productivity. We obtained very promising prospects that the design productivity could be improved 20 times for the enhanced VCDS (Figure 2).We will make a demonstration of the implemented pilot tool to show how effective our proposed methodology is.(*) VCore: Virtual Core(**) VCDS: Virtual Core based Design System

This paper proposes robotic kitchen counter, a novel kitchen counter with sensors to monitor a user's action and with the capability of changing its top plate height according to his preference. The robotic kitchen counter was realized by installing various kinds of sensors to the commercial kitchen counter and by putting a jack mechanism underneath. The sensor data acquisition and the top plate height setting can be done through network. Cooking experiments with this robotic kitchen counter showed that 1) there's an optimal kitchen counter height according to an individual person and to his action during cooking behavior, and that 2) the dynamic reappearance of the kitchen counter height he manually adjusted in the stages during the previous cooking behavior was recognized handful, which is the typical example of the simplest action-adapted and personally-fit assistance. The outstanding point of this robotic kitchen counter is that it can measure the cooking action without disturbing the cooking behavior itself while providing action-adapted and personally fit assistance based on the data obtained. The authors believe that the hardware and software techniques obtained through this development can be the starting point to develop other action-adapted and personally fit assistance system.

Underwater vehicles are expected as the attractive tools for the operation in the extreme environment such as the deep ocean survey. In order to realize the useful and practical robots, which can work in the ocean, underwater vehicles should take their action by judging the changing condition from their own sensors and actuators, and are desirable to make their behavior with limited efforts of the operators, because of features caused by the working environment. Therefore, the mobile robot should be autonomous and adaptive to their environment. Development of the path planning system, which can navigate the vehicle without the collision to the obstacles, is one of the most important problems in order to realize the autonomous underwater vehicles. In this paper, Self-Organizing Map (SOM) proposed by Kohonen is applied to the navigation, which takes the distances to the surroundings as inputs, and outputs the direction for the robot to proceed. The efficiency of path planning system is investigated through the simulation and experiments with an underwater vehicle "Twin-Burger".

Deals with basic research on underwater docking of flexible underwater structures using an active control system. The actively controlled underwater docking has such potentials on the installation or construction of underwater structures at deep water depth that the structures can be installed precisely on the desired point of seabed. For very large structure automated construction, it can be possible to assemble the onshore fabricated partitioned structures on site. In the paper, the H/sup /spl infin// controller is used for flexible structural control to avoid spillovers. Basin tests were executed using two types of neutrally buoyant flexible models with ultrasound ranging system and thrusters.