Makoto Oya

Muscle-like control of entertainment robot over internet

The robot technology is extending to social activities such as community work, home-use and entertainment. By combining the robot technology with the popularized public Internet, it is anticipated a new application field will come out. However, Internet, as its nature, does not permit real-time communication among robots and other systems including human operators and computers. A different approach is necessary regarding communication protocols and robot control schemes. This paper proposes the combination of the Web services technology and the autonomous robot motion generation is the proper approach. For the motion generation, we introduce the muscle-like control method, which can be applied to any kinds of robots easily with proving a variety of creature-like motions. The method is applied to gait generation of a simulated four-legged robot, and the results show that it can transit from a motion to another one smoothly. In addition, the simulated robot is controlled by the Web services over Internet for investigating the feasibility of the proposed control scheme in a real network circumstance. The result shows that the proposed method provides us smooth control of the robot, even we have overhead of Web service processes and delayed communication

Dynamic Model Harmonization Between Unknown eBusiness Systems

It is usually assumed that systems share an agreed model of business protocol to implement consistent exchange of series of business messages between eBusiness processes. R&Ds based on this approach are making progress such as model repository technology, business process modeling and business process description languages. This assumption, however, is not always satisfied when considering flexible and free dealings among independent and autonomous eBusiness systems demanded in future eBusiness environment, where systems having their own way of feasible interactions without an agreed business protocol model unexpectedly encounter each other, and want to execute business conversation using their best efforts.

A Smart HTTP Communicator: SMACH

Most developments and applications of current eBusiness systems focus on large enterprise systems. HTTP based full implementation of the Internet/Web protocol stack is used in such environment. On the other hand, small businesses or community works require simpler and smaller implementation not assuming big computer resource. This requirement exists also in other business-like environments such as robot communication, mobile devices and ubiquitous environment. Essential requirements for HTTP infrastructure are (1) to support HTTP protocol, and (2) to enable peer-to-peer communication. Currently existing infrastructures such as Apache and Mozilla, however, support more and do not fit to smaller and simpler applications. They were originally developed considering Web document access applications and have large functionality unnecessary for eBusiness communication. To solve this problem, we developed a new open source middleware essentially supporting HTTP and having both server and client feature called SMACH (Smart Communicator for HTTP). SMACH is designed based on three policies: small, bidirectional, and HTTP protocol focused. It supports minimum but enough HTTP communication function and symmetric APIs for server and client applications, having multi-threading based architecture with persistent TCP/IP connection pursuing maximum performance in small memory environments. SMACH can communicate with major existing products including Apache, IIS, Mozilla and IE, achieving high performance and small executable size. This paper provides its development policy, function, architecture, and results of interoperability tests and performance evaluation.