Ryoji Nakajima

A relax/refresh system applying virtual reality

A relax-refresh system applying virtual reality technology has been developed. The system is composed of a massage lounger, a head-mounted-display (HMD), a standard VCR, and an interface circuit which controls the massage chair and generates stereographic images. By sitting on the lounger and wearing the HMD, the user is freed from stress through stereographic images (visual stimulation), massage and vibration (body stimulation), and sound (aural stimulation). In this paper the overview of the developed system prototype is introduced and the result of a body effect experiment is described.<<ETX>>

A semi-autonomous security robot employing telepresence

There has been a great deal of work recently in the fields of teleoperation and telerobotics [5]. In these man-machine systems, a robot arm or a land vehicle are commanded to move in real-time by a human operator who is viewing the progress of the operation. The decisions on the task of moving the arm or vehicle to the desired position are made by the operator. A branch of research in this field has moved toward telepresence [2] or tele-existence [9], where the human operator is made to feel that he or she is located at the task site by providing her with as much input information about the task site as possible using stereo vision or contact force feedback. Telepresence allows the removal of the operator from the vehicle to a remote location, and can greatly increase operator safety and comfort in applications such as surveillance and fire-detection. Current integrated building systems use closed-circuit TV (CCTV) for surveillance and fixed flooror ceiling-mounted sensors for fire and intrusion detection. However, these systems are less than ideal since the user is limited to the fixed viewpoint of these cameras. Likewise, the sensors can only detect problems over a vague and general area. Further investigation of an alarm may endanger humans who must enter the hazardous area. Thus, we are developing a telepresence surveillance robot system that will be integrated into an intelligent building [7]. This system will allow a building operator to patrol a remote area from the safety and comfort of a building’s control center. The telepresence camera system has a master-slave configuration, in which the operator’s head is tracked in real time by the robot in the remote area. This important feature lets the user move about and look around the remote area as if he were actually there. This article presents an overview of the current system and a manual control system by the human operator using a joystick. This joystick control system, however, forces the operator to control the robot all the time. To decrease the workload of the operator, a semi-autonomous mobile function can be integrated with the manual system. Thus, we introduce a framework in which the operator constructs a moving path for the robot and the robot moves following the path. While the robot moves, it happens to meet obstacles. To avoid collision with the obstacles, a fuzzy control method [4, 10] is introduced.

Development of humanoid agent system employing the knowledge on transactional analysis

A humanoid agent has been studied that is employing artificial intelligence and emotions to communicate with users not only with speech but also with gestures. In order for the agent to interact with users in a smooth way, the idea of transactional analysis is introduced from the field of psychology into the agent. This work briefly describes the introduction of transactional analysis, followed by the architecture of humanoid agent that has been proposed.

A telepresence robot for surveillance use and development of its autonomous movement

Abstract A mobile telepresence robot is currently being developed for use in surveillance and fire-detection applications. The system permits precision observation and pinpoint data collection without subjecting the user to a possibly hazardous remote environment. Since control of such a robot is a complicated task, a telepresence operator-machine interface is designed to allow users to feel the robot as an extension of themselves. In this paper, the overview of the current system is shown, where the manual control system by the user using the joystick is explained. The control system, however, forces the user to control the robot all the time. In order to decrease the workload of the user, an autonomous movement of the robot based on fuzzy control will be integrated with the current system.