Shohei Matsumoto

Distance-based dynamic interaction of humanoid robot with multiple people

Research on human-robot interaction is getting an increasing amount of attention. Because almost all the research has dealt with communication between one robot and one person, quite little is known about communication between a robot and multiple people. We developed a method that enables robots to communicate with multiple people by selecting an interactive partner using criteria based on the concept of proxemics. In this method, a robot changes active sensory-motor modalities based on the interaction distance between itself and a person. Our method was implemented in a humanoid robot, SIG2, using a subsumption architecture. SIG2 has various sensory-motor modalities to interact with humans. A demonstration of SIG2 showed that the proposed method works well during interaction with multiple people.This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research No.15200015 and No.1601625, and COE Program of Informatics Research Center for Development of Knowledge Society Infrastructure.

Evaluation of Interface Toughness Between Submicron Island and Substrate

Micro-electronics and micro-mechanical devices consist of low-dimensional components such as islands, lines and films, and they have many intrinsic bi-materials interfaces. Stress concentration near an interface edge due to the deformation mismatch sometimes causes delamination, which brings about fatal malfunction of the device. On the other hand, the size required for the components becomes submicron-scale in order to shrink the device. It is necessary, therefore, to evaluate the interface strength among the submicron-components and the substrate. The size of the stress-concentrated region near an interface edge, which affects the delamination crack initiation, is dependent on the length scale; the field shrinks as the size of the component decreases [1]. For submicron-components, the region size also becomes submicron-meter order. It is not clear whether such a small region actually dominates the delamination or not. The purpose of the study is to elucidate the mechanism dominating the crack initiation at the interface edge between a submicron island and a substrate.