picoROBOTA

The current research carried out at picoROBOTA laboratory are related to the development of assistive robotics and devices, design of applied applications of biologically-inspired architectures as well as developement of intelligent machines with application to the forest, steel and solar energy industry

Other examples of projects currently pursued with researchers from other universities; such as Waseda University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, SSSA-PERCRO, Warsaw Institute of Technology, etc., are humanoid robots, perceptual robots, educational robots, and medical robots.

picoROBOTA's visitors:

for educational/research activities:

Dr. Gustavo Garcia, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan (now assistant professor at NAIST)

Prof. Gurvinder Virk, University of Gävle, Sweden (now working at Innotec, UK)

Prof. Atsuo Takanishi, Waseda University, Japan

Prof. Eiichiro Tanaka, Waseda University, Japan

Prof. Yukio Takeda, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Prof. Marco Ceccarelli, Universita' degli Studi di Cassino, Italy

Prof. Marco Fontana, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy

Prof. Miki Saijo, Tokyo Insitute of Technology, Japan

for research projects:

Chihiro Kato, exchange student (July - September 2019, master student at Tokyo Institute of Technology)

Tomohiro Oka, exchange student (June - August 2019, master student at Tokyo Institute of Technology)                                                   

Fernanda Amaral Melo, intern (August - December 2016, now aiming to get the bachelor degree at Brasilia University, Brazil)                       

Baltej Singh, intern (August - December 2016, now Ph.D. student at University of Alberta, Canada)                                                                 

Daniel R. Ramirez, intern (August - December 2016, now aiming to get the Ph.D. degree at ITESM - Campus Cd. de Mexico, Mexico)          

Erfan Shojaei Barjuei, intern (September - December 2015, now postdoc at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy)                                         

Thitipong Sansanayuth, intern (October 2015 - February 2016, now at Alten AB, Sweden)                                                                                  

Jose Pablo de la Rosa, intern (August - December 2014, now master student at Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara, Mexico)

Current Projects:

Project Title:  Development of a vision system for drones

Collaborators: Bitcraze AB 

Looking for graduate students: Yes

Summary:  Our research aims to develop an intelligent robot vehicle with multi-modal locomotion capabilities for the forest monitoring purpose. In particular, for an accurate navigation and automated monitoring as well as the integration of different locomotion modalities under different environmental conditions, autonomous navigation and landing in relatively close proximity to the dedicated target location is required. Due to the complexity of the proposed research, in this paper, we proposed a visual-based control system by detecting fiducial markers in order to hover, navigate and fly to the desired target location while remaining stable without adversely affecting the effective flight time due to additional sensors and computation. Based on the experimental results, the MAV was able to detect the fiducial markers as well as to land on the desired location.

Video: Click here

Project Title:  Development of a vision system for an eating assistive device

Collaborators: Camanio Care AB, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Waseda University

Looking for graduate students: Yes

Summary:  Undernutrition is a large problem amongst elderly. We believe that it is hard for the user him/herself to notice that they are eating too little. In Sweden many elderly lives alone with the help of home care services and there are often many different care givers involved, so to keep track of what a person is eating over the day and over time is difficult. In this project, we are aiming to enable Bestic to create food intake reports in order to decrease undernutrition among frail elderly by collecting data via a vision system. On the other hand, the design and implementation a vision-based control of the eating assistive device will be also carried out. Vision-based control (also known as visual servoing) servo control, using computer vision data in the servo loop to control the motion of a robot.

Project Title:  Quantitative Comfort Evaluation of an Eating Assistive Device

Collaborators: Nara Institute of Science and Technology

Looking for graduate students: Yes

Summary:  Robotic devices to assist humans in the self-feeding task have been developed to help patients with limited mobility in the upper limbs but the acceptance of these robots has been limited. In this work, we investigate how to quantitatively evaluate the comfort of an eating assistive device by estimating the interaction forces between the human and the robot when eating.

Project Title:  Development of a human-friendly walking assistive robot vehicle (hWalk)

Looking for graduate students: Yes

Video: Click here

Summary:  Up to now, the embodiment of bodily-kinaesthetic, perceptual and cognitive capabilities for assistive robots has been scarcely studied. This research aims to incorporate and develop the concept of robotic human science to enable the application in a human-friendly robot for assistive purposes. Due to the complexity of the proposed research; a human-friendly walking assist robot vehicle is being developed to provide physical support to the elderly.
The first prototype of the proposed human-friendly walking assist robot vehicle is composed by a mobile platform with on board controller and two actuated wheels (modified version from the one developed at Waseda University and now commercially available as MiniWay®), a commercial available 3-DOFs desktop haptic interface (Novint Falcon), a mobile computer used for computing the force feedback processing and the wireless module TY24SK-E2025-01 (manufactured by NEC) for communication between the mobile computer and the mobile robot. The control system implemented for the 3-DOFs desktop HI is composed by 4 modules: gravity compensation, force feedback processing, velocity estimation and the wireless communication module (acting as master).

Project Title:  Development of an intelligent carrying-medical tool assistant robot (iCAR)

Looking for graduate students: Yes

Video: Click here

Summary:  Up to now, the embodiment of bodily-kinaesthetic, perceptual and cognitive capabilities for assistive robots has been scarcely studied. This research aims to incorporate and develop the concept of robotic human science to enable the application in a human-friendly robot for assistive purposes. Due to the complexity of the proposed research; in this research,  a human-friendly robot vehicle designed for carrying-medical tools is being developed. In this research, a gesture-based recognition system based on
Time-Delay Neural Networks (TDNN) has been implemented and tested. The first prototype of the proposed system is composed by a mobile platform with on board controller and two actuated wheels (modified version from the one developed at Waseda University and now commercially available as MiniWay®), a stroller with four passive wheels, a 3D motion sensor, a mobile computer for signal processing and a wireless module for communication purposes. The proposed TDNN is composed of an input layer with 480 nodes, 3 hidden layers with 220, 120 and 152 nodes respectively; and 1 output layer with 8 nodes. A set of experiment were proposed and the performance of the implemented recognition
system has been verified.

Project Title:  Novel Human-Friendly Robotic Platforms for Educational Purposes

Looking for bachelor students: Yes

Summary: The goal of this project is focused in introducing novel educational robots that fulfill the following requirements at different levels of interaction: able of introducing from basic (perception-action schemes; etc.) to advanced topics (human-in-the-loop control; etc.) of human-robot interaction at the different levels of interaction (cooperative, autonomous, multimodal interactive interface); able of displaying the characteristics of a dynamical system but without extreme complication (i.e. humanoid robot); able of being affordable to both university and students; etc. For this purpose, a two-wheeled inverted pendulum robot (2WIP) and a desktop Haptic Interface are integrated.