With the development of the cloud computing, many services that provide a desktop environment over a network are coming into widespread use. In recent years, the demand that globalized product developments and cost reductions is increasing. This leads to a growing demand for using these services in product design and development activities, a challenge in this situation is to make 3D-CAD and CAE software available over remote desktop services of the cloud, namely Engineering Cloud. In this paper, we propose a lossy image compression method for 3D-CAD and CAE software at high compression ratio. This method extracts constant gradients by a frequency transform, which exploits the nature as artificial images in that the local variations in pixel value are constant. We demonstrate that this method achieves a 1.4 times improvement in compression ratio as compared with conventional JPEG. We also apply this method to a remote desktop system, which demonstrates that the bandwidth is reduced by 43% of JPEG case.

This paper discusses a practical system which, when incorporated in an autonomous mobile robot moving indoors, can determine the position of the robot and detect obstacles so that the robot can navigate appropriately. We have developed new real-time, reliable techniques using correlation operations to achieve vision-based localization and obstacle detection. These techniques include a landmark detection technique that assures stable detection even under variable brightness and an obstacle measurement technique that combines obstacle region segmentation with stereo vision. Our experiments have proven that these techniques can make the necessary measurements in 100 ms, assure stable measurement in environments of varying brightness, and are sufficient for mobile robots.

To study autonomous control of a space robot, the authors developed their Advanced Space Robot Testbed with Redundant Arms (ASTRA). Berthing a satellite moving in space is a difficult and dangerous task when done manually. This paper describes a robot which berthed a mockup satellite moving and rotating in zero gravity. Features of the robot include autonomous approach to a moving target satellite using visual satellite motion estimation, using real-time visual tracking control to track satellite handles with two robot arms, and grasping the satellite handles with minimum mechanical shock using a flexible wrist mechanism and impedance control. The authors ran their satellite berthing experiment on the ASTRA to check its performance.>