11 accepted papers
Humans find it difficult to perceive visually the level of force exerted on an object by a robot operating with positional control. According to research, humans perceive colors in terms of weight following the order of yellow, green, blue, and red, clockwise on the hue circle. We believe that by de
Robotic systems are used in various fields, including environmental exploration and conservation. It may be difficult to retrieve these robots or more cost-effective to discard them after achieving their purpose. Discarding such robots could pose a threat to the environment, especially if they are c
Recently, in the search for alternatives to conventional robots, various types of soft actuators and their applications have been studied. In particular, pneumatic soft actuators have the advantage of being lightweight and high power. One of the uses of these soft actuators is as a substitute for an…
For unmanned rescue, observation, and/or research, vehicles with high terrain adaptability, high speed, and high reliability are needed to reach hard-to-reach-locations. In order to extend the areas that can be explored, we propose a method and a robot capable of running on the surface of water with…
Currently, serious accidents are caused frequently by the aging of sewer pipes. Therefore, to inspect sewer pipes, we developed a peristaltic crawling robot that reproduces the locomotion of an earthworm. This robot can drive for more than 100m, and it can be used for the maintenance of sewer pipes…
This letter proposes a novel hybrid pneumatic power source for the development of a portable pneumatic source. The hybrid pneumatic source achieves a lightweight system by combining two pneumatic sources: one that can generate high pressure/small suppliable flow and one that can generate small press
A range of pneumatically-driven devices have been developed. However, these require a large air compressor, making them heavy, bulky, and therefore inappropriate for use in portable devices. In this study, we proposed and tested a portable pneumatic power source using the chemical reaction between s…
Unmanned rescue, observation, and/or research vehicles with high terrain adaptability, high speed, and high reliability are needed in difficult-to-reach locations. However, for most vehicles, high performance over rough terrain reduces the travel speed and/or requires complex mechanisms. We have dev…
In recent years in Japan, over half of all workers suffered from lower back pain. This has become a social problem that needs to be addressed. To reduce its occurrence, we developed a flexible, high-output waist assist suit called “AB-Wear” in a previous study. The AB-Wear suit can assist human moti…
In this study, a variable viscoelastic joint system comprising antagonized artificial muscles and magneto-rheological fluid brakes is proposed. This system enables human assisting devices such as robotic exoskeletons to retain structural softness when compared with the existing devices driven by mot…
Unmanned rescue, observation and/or research vehicles with high terrain adaptability, high speed, and high reliability are needed to reach difficult locations. However, most vehicles achieve improved performance over rough terrain at the expense of low speed and/or complex mechanisms. We developed a…