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Consumer needs are becoming more diverse, and retail e-commerce sales globally continue to grow. Thus, due in part to the aging population, there is a shortage of people to carry out the physical works in warehouses and factories. Hence, logistics is a field where the demand for the automation of work is increasing. However, situations of logistics business become more liable to change recently, and it becomes hard to introduce conventional automation systems. Therefore, in previous research, we proposed a transportation system that can automatically deal with the change of the material handling modules’ relative configuration in a single transportation line in accordance with a change of the logistics flow. This system consists of autonomous material handling modules such as conveyors, autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs), and manipulators to reduce the work-hours required for on-site construction or layout change. In this paper, we focus on how the system determines the layout of multiple transportation lines so that AGVs can transport goods from one line to another. There are two simple ways to realize this determination. One is to measure the layout by hand and input the data into the system, and the other is to have the AGVs explorer and check every conveyor. However, these ways would take much time. Therefore, we developed a method for the system to rapidly understand the lines’ layout using combinations of AGV’s line searching and conveyor’s neighbor recognition. In a verification experiment, we constructed two separate conveyor lines in an 8m×8m area in a physical simulation and ran the AGV. As a result, the system acquired the transportation line layout in 45 seconds, and we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We investigated the influence of a high-power transmission on the structural and optical characteristics of an optical connector with a large splice loss. We show the relationship between optical power loss and fiber withdrawal.

In order for a humanoid robot to achieve higher physical performance, it is important to generate dynamic whole-body motion under the constraints of physical limitations and dynamic balance. In this paper, we propose the method for generating dynamic whole-body motion such as sports motion based on optimization techniques. Taking a tennis forehand swing as an example of dynamic motion, we aim to increase the swing speed. The proposed methods are composed of the following two methods: 1) the offline swing optimization and 2) the online swing modification. In the offline swing optimization, we use non-linear optimization techniques to maximize the swing speed and satisfy the constraints. We generate all joint trajectories by optimizing control points of uniform B-splines. In the online swing modification, we modify a part of the optimized trajectories online considering joint velocity limits, since the predicted ball trajectory might change before a robot hits the ball. These methods are validated through the following experiments. First, we carry out the experiment in which the actual robot JAXON executes the optimal swing motion. We confirm that the method of the offline swing optimization generates the feasible motion which reaches up to 14.6m/s. We also apply the online swing modification to the optimized motion in the simulation. Then we evaluate how accurately we have to predict the ball trajectory.

In this paper, we develop a waterproof suit for humanoid robots and propose an underwater walking control method. Although very few life-sized humanoid robots are completely waterproof, we can easily make these humanoid robots watertight by putting a waterproof suit on them. In water, humanoid robots are influenced by the two forces due to the water: buoyancy and drag force. We take buoyancy into account when generating a walking pattern because the force is large and easy to estimate before walking. However, drag force is small and difficult to precisely predict and therefore, we treat the force as an unknown disturbance. In our method, we modify footsteps based on the Capture Point in order to deal with large disturbances. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods through an experiment in which a life-sized humanoid robot walks on a floor, stairs and debris in water.

This paper presents the development of life-sized high-power humanoid robot JAXON. Humanoid robots for disaster relief assistance need the same degree of physical performance as humans. We have developed STARO as the high-power humanoid robot with a high degree of physical performance. However this is not enough for practical use of the humanoid robot in a disaster site. We consider the following as additional conditions to operate humanoid robots for disaster relief assistance outside of the lab in outdoor environments. 1) Robots have humanlike body proportion to work in infrastructure matched to human body structure. 2) Robots have energy sources such as batteries and act without tethers. 3) Robots walk with two legs or four limbs and continue to work without fatal damage in unexpected rollover. JAXON satisfied these conditions. We demonstrates the performance of JAXON through the experiment of getting out of a vehicle, stepping over walls, and operating on batteries. Further more, we assesses the performance of the strong armor and the shock absorbing structure through a backward over-turning accident.