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The ceiling serves as an ideal location for robots to handle transportation tasks, as it ensures minimal interference between automated guided vehicles (AGV) and human activities. A previous study developed a ceiling mobile robot called HanGrawler 2. It can travel at a high speed of 1.0 m/s to compete with ground vehicles. However, it occasionally fails during high-speed travel. This study aims to improve the reliability of starting, accelerating, and traveling at high speed. Optical motion capture is used to observe the crawler behavior of HanGrawler 2. The observation of the crawler behavior revealed that the crawler moves on an inflated trajectory during the high-speed movement. In addition, the experimental results show that the collision is not caused by the inflation, but by the push-in timing. The reliability of high-speed travel was improved by installing an encoder and optimizing the push-in timing in accordance with speed fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, we describe a method for constructing a remote ultrasound diagnostic system. Remote diagnosis can be realized using a communication network. We have developed a master--slave type remote medical system to diagnose shoulder diseases, such as dialysis-related amyloid arthropathy (DRAA), by ultrasonographic images. Proper positioning, orientation, and contact force between the ultrasound probe and the affected area of the patient are required in order to acquire proper diagnostic images. Safety and manipulability are also required when operating the remote medical system through a communication network. Therefore, the system has impedance control capability for positioning of the master and slave manipulators in order to convey the contact force and enhance manipulability. In addition, the system has continuous-path control capability for the orientation of the slave manipulator in order to realize smooth and accurate motion of the ultrasound probe, even if the sampling rate of the transmission of the orientation data of the master manipulator is not sufficient. The results of remote diagnostic experiments demonstrated that a healthcare professional could diagnose real patients through a communication network using the constructed system. Index Terms--Continuous-path control, impedance control, master--slave manipulation, remote medical system, remote ultrasound diagnostic system.

At urban production sites, laser cutting is an essential technology for high-speed flexible sheet-metal processing. This study aims to detect defective cuts by sensing laser-cutting-induced light emission and elucidate meaningful features for processing-based detection. The proposed method comprises three steps. In the first step, the sensors installed in the laser head acquire the spectra of light generated during processing, and data analysis software converts the spectral data into spectrograms and stacked-graph images. In the second step, image processing software extracts the edges of both images and emphasizes the periodic features in normal laser cutting. In the final step, a one-class support vector machine recognizes defective cuts from the extracted features. Verification tests using multiple normal and abnormal cut data confirmed that the proposed method accurately detected defective cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]