At the time of a large-scale urban earthquake disaster, human search activities and information collection are the most important processes of rescue operations. Robots for search and rescue (e.g., aero-robots, crawler type robots) have been studied extensively recently. We have developed a cable driven balloon robot for information acquisition from the sky during disaster rescue and recovery operations. The balloon, from which hang several sensors (sensor unit, SU), uses "a natural shape balloon". Three cables connect the SU, and the balloon, with its sensors, is driven by expansion and contraction of the cable length. Cameras and several sensors or wireless relays are loaded onto the SU. The attitude stability of the SU is required to eliminate camera shaking resulting from wind. Such stability is necessary for high-precision information collection because this robot is used in the open air. This study verifies the attitude stability of an SU using a cable arrangement between the balloon and the SU; it statically calculates the movable scope of the SU at an arbitrary wind speed and direction

A redundant wire-driven parallel robot, the WARP manipulator, is a new robot mechanism which is suitable especially for high speed assembling of lightweight objects such as semiconductors. In this paper, a WARP manipulator was designed from the viewpoint of working space by considering conditions that the travelling plate must be abbe to generate arbitrary amounts of force and moment and the wires are not to be in contact. Simulation results of working space proved the validity of the design procedure described. A prototype of WARP manipulator was constructed. The kinematic parameters were calibrated for position control.

A VLSI chip fully compatible with ISO/IEC 13818 2 (MPEG-2 video) has been developed. The chip is conforming to main profile @ main level of the standard, which realizes real-time decoding of ITU-R Rec.601 format moving pictures. In addition, it is also designed to operate as a part of MPEG-2 encoder. The chip size and power dissipation are minimized by optimizing its architecture and by using hardware macro cells for bulky circuits such as multipliers. As a result, the chip has been implemented with approximately 620K transistors on 11.35/spl times/11.35 mm using a triple metal 0.5 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. The chip has performed well in evaluations on a PC-based testbed.

Complete equations of motion for 6-DOF direct drive wrist joint's based on the Stewart platform are derived and analyzed. Although the derived equations are highly complex, the dynamics of the wrist joint are simple if the centroid of the hand is close to the platform, and if the centroid; of the actuators are close to the base. In the case of a specific position and orientation of the platform, it is found that the dynamics of the actuators cancel each other and that the equations are simple because the actuators in the Stewart platform are placed in parallel. The equations are simple and so is the design of a controller for the wrist especially when the mechanism of the wrist joint is symmetrical and uses actuators.>