Junko Hirokawa

Development of a concept model of a robotic information home appliance, ApriAlpha

We have proposed a concept of a robotic information home appliance corresponding to one category of home robots, and developed ApriAlpha, a concept model of the robotic information home appliance. ApriAlpha is a wheel locomotion type human friendly home robot which controls advanced home appliances, standing between their users and them as a voice controlled information terminal, and offers security and information services to users. We have integrated various robot technologies such as voice communication, image recognition, planning and motion control on ApriAlpha, and we have introduced a framework of the distributed object technology based open robot controller architecture (ORCA), which we are currently developing in view of its easy extension and efficient development. This paper describes the proposed robotic information home appliance and its concept model, ApriAlpha. The functions of the developed robot are confirmed by performing several demonstrations, and the merit of applying the framework of ORCA to the home robot controller is also confirmed through its development.

Mobile robot global localization using particle filters

Mobile robot global localization is the problem of determining a robotpsilas pose in an environment by using sensor data, when the initial position is unknown. Particle filter based Probabilistic algorithm called Monte Carlo localization is the current popular approach to solve the robot localization problem. In this paper we introduce the multi-sensor based Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) method which represents a robotpsilas belief by a set of weighted samples and use the laser range finder (LRF) sensor to measurement update. We also proposed likelihood based particle filter to solve the kidnapped problem. The experiment results illustrate the efficiency and robustness of particle filter approach for our mobile robot.

New entropy-based adaptive particle filter for mobile robot localization

Over the last decade, particle filters have been applied with great success to a variety of state estimation problem. The standard particle filter suffers poor efficiency during the estimation process, especially in the global localization and kidnapped problem. In this paper, we proposed a novel information entropy-based adaptive approach to improve the efficiency of particle filters by adapting the number of particles. The information entropy-based adaptive particle filter approaches use the information entropy to present the uncertainty of a mobile robot to the environment. By continuously obtaining the sensor information, the robot gradually reduces the uncertainty to the environment and, therefore, reduces the particle number for the estimation process. We derived the mathematic equation relating the information entropy with particle number. Extensive localization experiments using a mobile robot showed that our approach yielded drastic improvements and efficiency performance over a standard particle filter with fixed particles and over other adaptive approaches.

Service robot localization using improved Particle filter

Recently, Particle filter becomes the most popular approach in mobile robot localization and has been applied with great success to a variety of state estimation problems. In this paper, the particle filter is applied in position tracking and global localization. Moreover, the posterior distribution of robot pose in global localization is usually multimodal due to the symmetry of the environment and ambiguous detected features. Considering these characteristics, we proposed the cluster particle filter to improve the global localization robustness and accuracy. Experiment results show the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in our service robot ApriAlphatrade Platform.

Universal Design with Robots Toward the Wide Use of Robots in Daily Life Environment

Robot technology has been cultivated by developing robots that work in special environments, such as industrial robots, robots for performing maintenance in nuclear power plants, and robots for use in space. On the other hand, the application fields of robots are expanding to include aspects of daily life, for example medical robots in hospitals, welfare robots in homes for the elderly, robots to perform cleaning in buildings and robots for use at home. Furthermore, the essentials of robot technology (RT) have been applied widely to endow mechatronics products with intelligence. Advanced examples include implementation of a robotic function in an automobile so that it automatically maintains a distance from the car in front, and an automatic parking function. In particular, various kinds of robots for home use, such as security robots, caretaking robots, information service robots, and communication robots, are now being developed (Japan Robot Association, 2003). A robot that provides support to people at home is generally called a “Daily Life Support Robot” or “Human Symbiosis Robot” in Japan (Japan Robot Association, 2005, 2006), (Matsuhira et al., 2005), (Hosoda et al., 2006). However, it is still difficult to realize a home robot capable of moving through doors and coping with differences in level, although the growing popularity of barrier-free designs are helpful in this regard. Here, we consider the concept of Universal Design (UD). UD, which is a design concept that aims to satisfy the needs of everybody in daily life, is also important for home robots or robots in daily life environment. Robots can move easily where wheelchairs can move easily. Robots can easily handle what a person who has trouble handling things can handle easily. Similarly, robots can easily find a sign that is easy for a person with impaired sight to find. A robot will be thought as one of users for UD. Thus the UD is important. Improvement of the environment by applying the UD concept is expected to lead to expansion of the sphere of robot activity and to spur practical use of robots. We propose Universal Design with Robots (UDRobTM), a universal design concept encompassing both people and robots (Matsuhira et al., 2004), (Wada, 2004). A conceptual design of a robot-system based on UDRobTM has been developed and is presented here. So far, robot design has been mainly considered in terms of the figure or shape of robots themselves. We adopt the UD both for robots and the

ApriAlpha V3 - sharp ear robot - and the omni-directional auditory process

Home robots will help us household works in the living environment. The robots need to listen to users order and communicate with him/her. For the interaction between the user and the robot, we developed the omni-directional auditory process. This process allows the robot recognize the direction of the sound source of users voice - that is the direction of user. It extracts the sound stream of users speech, and recognizes the contents of the speech. We implemented this process into ApriAlphatrade V3 - sharp ear robot, and exhibited in Aichi Expo 2005. This paper describes the summary of ApriAlphatrade V3 and the omni-directional auditory process - the estimation of the voice direction with the function and the experimentation of the process