Hisao Niwa

Net-accessible pet-type robot for aged people's welfare

We present a pet-type robot system for aged peoples welfare. The robot can communicate with the people autonomously, and also it is net-accessible, and that feature allows the people to communicate with others, directly or using the communication server. The system consists of pet-type robots and the information center. Pet-type robots can treat as a pet, which can talk to user(s), give information of the local communities, and watch over them and send some information to carers at the information center if needed. The robot should, treat as an information terminal as well. Considering necessity and sufficiency, the robot has four motors symbolize emotions of the robot, which is essential for our object. We have demonstrated and examined some features of this robot system for aged people and certified some effects of our system.

Character recognition system with cooperation of pattern and symbolic processing

A newly developed character recognition method is proposed that can be applied to low quality printed documents. In this method, the cooperation of pattern processing with neural networks and symbolic processing with knowledge of language is adopted. If errors occur at one part, another part detects it and sends the error information to all parts. After successive iterations until no error is detected, a recognition result is obtained. A character recognition of 98.4 percent is obtained with this method. This rate is 2.8 percent higher than the result of a conventional method with no information exchange among processing parts.