No.188
1996.11

<研究紹介>   ISASニュース 1996.11 No.188

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MECHATRONICS: State of Art & Future Development

   Fumio Harashima

 Mechatronics is a relatively new engineering discipline, and is defined as follows: "The synergetic integration of mechanical engineering with electronic and intelligent computer control in the design and manufacture of industrial products and processes".

 Some of the major technical areas involved in mechatronics are:
  Modeling and Design
  Manufacturing
  System Integration
  Motion Control
  Actuators and Sensors
  Vibration and Noise Control
  Intelligent Control
  Micro Devices and Opto-Electronic Systems
  Robotics
  Automotive systems
  Other applications

 Maturing of these technical areas resulted in the establishment of Mechatronics as a new engineering discipline. Currently, the research in this area focuses on providing mechatronic systems with some form of intelligence. Initially, attempts were made to fuse Artificial Intelligence with Mechatronics. However, this approach proved not to be very successful. Mostly because Artificial Intelligence turned out not to fulfill due expectations. It appears that the key words to capture the nature of advanced intelligent mechatronics are "Fusion of Informatics and Mechatronics. This will involve areas and aspects such as:
  - robots as interface between humans and machines
  - use of human intelligence
  - use of computers to assist human intelligence
  - use of communication networks

 The initial excitement surrounding industrial applications of robots is now gone. At the university level, this is reflected in a low level of interest in the research in industrial robotics. There is also a noticeable decline in the use of industrial robots at the factory floor as a sheer replacement of human beings. What recently captured imagination of researches from academia and industry (especially in Japan) is the use of robots in our society. This interest has been amplified by the availability of very fast communication networks. This opens a possibility for the robotic and mechatronic systems to be connected to each other via fast computer networks to provide functions such as cooperation and data base sharing to assist people in their daily life. With this in mind, there have been attempts to use the Internet to control robots and establish interconnected robotic networks. Although the communication speeds of such networks are now limited to only some Mbps, it is expected that within the next ten years speeds of up to 156 Mbps will be supported by the information infrastructure based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and optical fiber.

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  Two year ago, the Ministry of Construction of Japan established a project named "Unmanned Construction of a Barrier to Prevent Landslides". In this project, unmanned construction machines such as trucks, bulldozers, and power shovels were controlled by the radio and positioned by GPS. 3D images were used for the equipment control. This experiment demonstrated practicality of the use of a tele-operation system in a real large-scale environment. It was also a step towards realizing computer networked robotics.

 The availability of even higher speeds, in the range of tens of Gbps, will facilitate the development of new technologies in not so distant future. This will open new prospects for the robotic area, with robots serving as interface devices between human beings and the information infrastructure. For example, aged and handicapped people will be assisted by robots connected to the information infrastructure and remotely controlled by other people through the information infrastructure.



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 A group of robots, connected to each other through the information infrastructure will become an integral part of the future society, with each individual robot embedded with some intelligence (not full intelligence) and partly controlled by people through the information infrastructure.



 Of course, robots will be becoming increasingly autonomous with our understanding of human intelligence and ability to capture it in a form suitable for embedding in machines. The system in which robots and humans are connected through communication network will form a new type of society. This will require us to pay more attention to the study of human behavior and dynamics of the human society in the context of robotic research. It will require non-engineering disciplines to be included in this study.

 In order to assist us in our everyday life environment, robots will have to possess human-like skills. Skill acquisition and transfer have become a very important part of robotic research. The activity in this area focuses on the skill extraction for specific human activities pre-recorded using the Virtual Reality technology.

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 In April 1995, The Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan published a special issue of its journal dedicated to "New Technologies for Human-Robot Cooperation". This issue reflects the shift in the research interests towards areas which, only a few years ago, were regarded as at the fringes of the mainstream of research in robotics. Titles of selected articles included in this issue are listed next:
 "Technical Issues on Robot-Human Collaboration" (by F. Hara)
 "Monitoring of Facial Expression" (by H. Kobayashi and F. Hara)
 "Intention and Behavior Understanding for Service Robot" (by T.Sato and H. Mizoguchi)
 "Motion Planning of Robot to Serve Human Softly" (by Y. Uno)
 "Audio-Visual-Tactile Interface for a Robot with Human Being and Scene" (by N Onishi)
 "Medical Device with Compliance to Human Body " (by T. Sakaki)
 " My Agent: A Practical Personal Assistant " (by T. Kamada)
 " Robot Human coordination Based on Virtual Tool Dynamics" (by K. Kosuge)
  " Man-Machine Interface on Arm and Leg Prostheses" (by A. Nakagawa)
 "A Code of Robot Behavior in Human Society" (by S. Hirose)
 "Possibility of the Appearance of Mind in Robot Systems" (by S. Sugars)

 Further reading:
 F. Harashima, "Intelligent Mechatronics", Proc. of IEEE/IECON 95, vol.1, pp xxxii-xxxiii, Nov. 1995
 F.Harashima, "Intelligent Mechatronics", Proc. of IEEE/AMC 96, pp15-17, March, 1996.

(東京大学生産技術研究所 原島 文雄)


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