In this paper, the socio-economic problems facing the construction industry in Japan are presented, including the COVID19 pandemic, an aging population, aging infrastructure, and severe natural ...disasters, and a project to tackle the problem is introduced. This project, called 'Collaborative robots for adaptation of diverse environments and innovation of infrastructure construction,' is a sub-project of the Moonshot project organized by the Cabinet Office in Japan. The key approach to proceeding with this project is an 'open design' for robotics. Based on this approach, three aspects of the research plans are introduced: (1) robots that flexibly adapt to the environment, (2) Many-modal AI for environment evaluation, and (3) Physical AI and dynamic collaboration of multi-robots.
In recent years, the oceans debris is increased because of human’s activity. Especially, the plastic debris, such as plastic bottles, is not biodegradable, and therefore those are creating serious ...environmental problems. The ocean debris collecting in the world is done through volunteer activities. However, these activities require a lot of time and labor. In this research, we proposed a method of ocean debris collecting USV operation method. Also, we designed and developed a USV (Unmanned Surface Vehicle) for the purpose of autonomous oceans debris collecting mission and evaluated the developed ocean debris collecting device. In the development of USV, electronic parts, which are to operate the mission autonomously, were selected. Then, each electronic part was placed inside the waterproof box according to the designed power and communication system diagram. In the development of oceans debris collecting device, we designed a belt conveyor type device. A motor was selected to rotate the device and a decelerator, which used the planetary gear mechanism, was designed. To evaluate the performance of the developed ocean debris collecting device, we tested various types of plastic bottles in tank environment. As a result of the experiment, the developed USV collected various types of plastic bottles with a 47.7% probability.
Motion Analysis of a Sphere Driven by Rollers Kimura, Kenji; Chikushi, Shota; Ishii, Kazuo ...
Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan,
2020, 2020-00-00, Volume:
38, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Open access
Friction drive systems are adopted for many robots of spherical locomotion type. Such systems have problems, including traversing uneven surfaces, slipping of the roller, and dust between the sphere ...and the roller. Despite of the disadvantages, these systems attract attention because of the possibility of stepped climbing and omnidirectional locomotion. In the future, it is anticipated that the mechanism using the sphere are developed. When the kinematics with respect to multiple rotational axes in arbitrary contacted on the sphere is clarified, the mechanism may be widely used. In the paper, a general theorem for kinematics is discussed including the number of rollers driving the sphere, the type of roller (constraint or unconstraint), and the contact points of the rollers on the sphere and the roller axes direction. To verify the validity of the kinematics model a locomotion model of the ball dribbling mechanism with the two rollers is presented as a special example by carrying out the experimental demonstration using the device robot.
The middle-size league soccer competition is an important RoboCup event designed to promote advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. In recent years, soccer robots using a dribbling ...mechanism, through which the ball is controlled using two driving rollers, have been adopted by teams worldwide. A survey conducted during the 2017 World Cup in Nagoya revealed that the teams determined their roller arrangements heuristically without the use of a formal mathematical process. In this study, we focus on sphere slip speed to develop a mathematical model for sphere rotational motion, allowing for slip. Using this framework, we derived the relationship between the sphere slip and mobile speeds and evaluated the roller arrangements used by the participating teams.
In this work, we propose an arbitrary viewpoint visualization system for disaster response robots. Robot operation from safety areas using teleoperation is highly desirable. To provide sufficient ...information, it is common to employ multiple displays, however, this often reduces operability. To avoid reduced operability we integrate all acquired images into a single bird eye view. The system is also capable of moving this viewpoint to any arbitrary position for ease of operation, and to overlay a computer-generated image of the robot that is synchronized to match the real robot pose onto the generated view when necessary. Experiments confirmed pose synchronization, generation of views from arbitrary positions, as well as improved operability.
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