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Robot Control Research Team

In the development of robots for nursing and care, which support care workers with strong force, we focus on fundamental researches and their applications on robust and flexible control, e.g., interaction control between human and robot, simultaneous optimization of structure and control, control for smart materials, etc.

Research Topics

1. System and Control for Safety, Security, and Confort of Nursing Support Robot

  • Topic 1. Cooperative control for safety and security
  • It is assumed that the robot to be developed could help elderly people transfer from a wheel chair to a bed and vice versa. So it is very important to establish cooperative control of whole actuators (arms, waist, and wheels) which ensure safety and security of the robotfs behavior.

  • Topic 2. Decentralized sampled-data control to enhance reliability
  • When controlled objects are complex and/or large-scaled, it is necessary to guarantee an indispensable performance even under troubles and failures on parts of systems. Decentralized control strategy is suitable to achieve this reliability. And also sampled-data control design method takes care of inter-sample behavior in the digital control systems to achieve high performance.

2. System and Control for bringing out Maxmum Performances of Sensor/Actuator

  • Topic 3. Giant power generation by using dynamics
  • The object of multi-bodies has a potential power; when multi-bodies are controlled even by tiny actuators, it could totally generate huge force or torque at the moment of actuatorsfphases harmonizing. This subject is challengeable to establish a mechanism of generating impulsive and giant power.

  • Topic 4. Active sensing and sensor integration for intelligent control
  • This subject aims to develop active sensing to extract control-oriented information from tactile, vision, acoustic and olfactory data. In particular, tactile sensors are located on the arms and vision sensors are set in the head. Therefore, the issue of active sensors is just how to control joint angles of elbow, shoulder, and waist. Sensor integration is also needed to get useful information from many sensors.

  • Topic 5. Multi-fingered robot with ability to use daily life tools(Hayakawa,Yoshida)
  • It is expected that robots will work in the home soon. In addition to nursing care, there is a lot of housework for which robots should use various kinds of tools. From this observation, home robots must have multi-fingers to use daily life tools and it is needed to develop control methods for multi-fingered robots.