This paper proposes a new object handling device for a robot, in which a conventional vacuum suction cup is provided with force sensing ability by coating a piezoelectric thin film polymer, i.e., PolyVinylidene DiFluoride (PVDF), on its surface. It can detect the applied force by piezoelectric effect of coated thin film. The feature of our study is that the suction cup can work not only as a grasping tool but also as a force sensor. PVDF thin film was prepared by dip-coating method which can coat thin film directly on a three dimensional (3D) surface. Although the film with sufficient piezoelectric d 33 constant, e.g., 34 pC/N, was achieved after polarization process in case of flat surface, it was not achieved, however, on 3D bellows surface. To address this problem, as an alternative method, the feasibility of lamination of already polarized film was investigated.

In the way of biomimetic research, we have developed a painless needle mimicking mosquito's proboscis. A real three-dimensional (3D) sharp and jagged needle shape elaborately like mosquito, however, was difficult to achieve as far as using conventional fabrication methods. For this purpose, a 3D laser lithography with ultrafine resolution of 200 nm (0.2 μm) is employed in this article. Unlike other reported sole needles, presented microneedle is divided into two half parts, each is shaped like eaves-trough and dependently moved. The combined halves act as one hollow microneedle, which can draw up human blood by capillary action. The resistive force during insertion can be reduced when the two halves are alternately advanced, which mimics the motion of mosquito's proboscis.

This paper describes a vacuum gripper that imitates the sucker of the octopus which is useful for the handling of industrial parts. It is difficult to use other sucker type vacuum grippers, but this gripper can adhere to rigid materials since the sucker is flexible. In the present work, we evaluated the effect of a liquid membrane on vacuum suction, since the industrial part often has a liquid membrane of, for example, oil and water. The success rate of grip was increased by wetting the surface, regardless of the object's shape and weight, since the liquid membrane filled the gap between the gripper and object. For the same reason, the maximum adsorption force was improved up to 1.8 times of 46 N.

A spread-spectrum clock generator (SSCG) that is characterized by a low jitter voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with a high-frequency limiter and an autocalibration function is developed for a Serial-ATA application. The high-frequency limiter prevents the SSCG from going into an unlocked state. The proposed VCO achieved far less jitter than a conventional one because a proposed structure has fewer operating MOSs that are noise sources. The autocalibration technique calibrates the VCO sensitivity, the maximum frequency of the VCO output signal, and the characteristics of the limit function to prevent the SSCG from degrading an output jitter and an electromagnetic interference (EMI) reduction due to a process variation. The proposed SSCG with the autocalibration function was fabricated in a 0.13-μm CMOS process. The variation in the jitter in 250-cycles at 1.5 GHz with spread-spectrum clocking (SSC) is improved from 2.1-7.8 ps to 1.9-3.3 ps and the EMI reduction is achieved as 10.0 dBm by the proposed autocalibration technique.

A flexible vacuum gripper having miniature arrayed valves is proposed; the valves are normally closed, and opened when contacted with object. Since the gripper is made of flexible polymer material and only the valves contacted with the object are opened to suck the surface, this gripper can hold a free-form surface such as having steps, curvatures, etc. Namely, the valve is autonomously switchable between open and close states. As the valve becomes small, the gripper can cope with higher step and higher curvature. We fabricate this gripper using Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology; this technology makes it possible to fabricating many elements with micrometer order high precision by batch processing. Two types of gripper were fabricated; one is a large-scale gripper for verifying the working principle, another is a miniature gripper based on MEMS. The absorbed weights of the large-scale and miniature grippers were 19.6 N (2 kgf) and 120 mN (12 gf), respectively.

The mosquito proboscis is composed of seven micro parts. Among them, labrum and maxillae play important roles in insertion. The labrum is a central needle which sucks blood; two maxillae are left/right needles aside the labrum, respectively. They cooperatively move, i.e., one maxilla goes forward, labrum goes forward, another maxilla goes forward, successively. We noticed that the maxilla has a jagged harpoon-like shape on its tip area, which has an anchoring effect. We proposed the easy insertion mechanism as follows: the equivalent stiffness, which is the ratio of the resistance force relative to the moving distance, is considered. The total stiffness in pushing out the central needle can be made smaller than zero due to the anchoring effect of the side needles. We named it as “negative stiffness mechanism.” Equivalent stiffness during pulling/pushing a fabricated needle was experimentally estimated, which indicated the validity of proposed mechanism.

A laser tracking system is employed for measuring robot arm's tip with high accuracy. Geometric parameters in a robot kinematic model are calibrated by minimizing errors between measured positions and predicted ones based on the model. Residual errors caused by non-geometric parameters are further reduced by using neural networks, realizing high positioning accuracy of sub-millimeter order. To speed up the calibration process, the smaller number of measuring points is preferable. Optimal measuring points, which realize high positioning accuracy with small point number, are selected using genetic algorithm (GA).

Recently multi-legged walking robots are widely developed. For these robots to walk safely, a sole sensor with high performance is desired. In the present paper, an arrayed type tactile sensor made of flexible silicone rubber, which is based on micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) technology, was developed. This sensor was applied as a sole sensor of a legged mobile robot. By processing the force data from many sensing elements using neural networks, information of contact force, i.e., three dimensional x, y, and z components of force vector, was able to be detected, which was confirmed by both simulation and experiment.

Most applications based on J2EE platform use rolebased access control as an efficient mechanism to achieve security. The current approach for specifying access rule is based on methods of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). In large-scale systems, where a large number of EJBs are used and the interactions between EJBs are complex, direct use of this methodbased approach is error-prone and difficult to maintain. We propose an alternative approach for specifying access control policy based on the concept of business function.

One big problem in the high-speed interface macro development and the support for the high-speed network business which Fujitsu held, was solved by the loop back LSI testing technique. In future, Fujitsu want to advance the examination of higher quality and further efficiency improvement for ATE cost reduction.

This paper presents a precise system for handwritten Chinese and Japanese character recognition. Before extracting directional element feature (DEF) from each character image, transformation based on partial inclination detection (TPID) is used to reduce undesired effects of degraded images. In the recognition process, city block distance with deviation (CBDD) and asymmetric Mahalanobis distance (AMD) are proposed for rough classification and fine classification. With this recognition system, the experimental result of the database ETL9B reaches to 99.42%.

Presents a replication technique based on the FTAG (fault-tolerant attribute grammar) computation model, where instances of a replicated application are active on different groups of processors called replicas. FTAG is a functional and attribute-based model. The developed replication technique implements "active parallel replication", i.e. all replicas are active and concurrently compute a different piece of the application's parallel code. In our model, replicas cooperate not only to detect and mask failures but also to perform parallel computation. The replication mechanisms are supported by the FTAG run-time system and are fully application-transparent. Different novel mechanisms for checkpointing and recovery are developed. Rollback is achieved only if the system experiences multiple failures, otherwise forward recovery is performed. The replication technique takes full advantage of parallel computation to reduce the computation time.

The development of an experimental high-performance microprocessor chip based on a 0.3- mu m BiCMOS technology is discussed. It is designed to operate at a 250-MHz clock rate. It includes two processors, each of which executes two instructions in parallel. The chip performs 1000 MIPS when instructions and data are fetched from primary caches. It also includes a four-wave interleaved secondary cache assessed in parallel according to a split-bus protocol, to reduce shared memory conflicts. The VLSI architecture and design results of this chip are described.>