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Plenary Speech
Mechatronics technologies are now steadily penetrating in our daily lives. We are surrounded by mechatronic products and interact with them in many ways. In particular, mechatronics devices may potentially improve the quality of life of elderly people and patients with impairments. In this talk, several key technologies that we have developed for assisting such people in walking are introduced. These technologies include sensing technologies for identifying the intent of human, decision making algorithms to decide the right amount of assistance to the human and actuation technologies to provide forces and torques to selected human joints. In the design of mechatronic devices interacting with humans, the dynamics of human is an important element and the compatibility between machine and human must be optimized. If the device is interacting with normal and healthy humans, the design may take advantages of robust and intelligent controllability of a human. In case of assistive devices for elderly and people with impairments, such approaches will not be appropriate, and the controller is required to be predictable, precise, robust and intelligent. It is desired to have zero impedance for actuators to realize an ideal force mode actuation. Otherwise, a human will have to make additional efforts to overcome the undesirable resistance. We will present how the Flexible Joint Actuators (FJA) may be controlled to act as a zero impedance actuator. Also, the assistive systems require a means for detecting human intention and monitoring the current status of health or safety. Various sensor technologies are available for this purpose, e.g. EMG sensors, joint angle sensors and so on. For patients and elderly people, however, it is desired that sensors are easy to use and yet reliable and capable to generate relevant information. We will present the idea of smart shoes, which measure the distribution of foot pressures for robust estimation of phases in a human gait and detection of abnormalities. Based on the estimated phase, the control algorithm is adapted for most effective assistance of the user. This talk is based on research by Kyoungchul Kong and Joonbum Bae. Masayoshi Tomizuka holds the Cheryl and John Neerhout, Jr., Distinguished Professorship Chair in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Keio University, Tokyo, Japan and his Ph. D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in February 1974. He joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley in 1974. He served as Vice Chair of Mechanical Engineering from December 1989 to December 1991 and from July 1995 to December 1996. He also served as Director of Engineering Systems Research Center of the College of Engineering from July 1999 to August 2002. He served as Program Director of the Dynamic Systems and Control Program at the National Science Foundation from September 2002 to December 2004. At UC Berkeley, he teaches courses in dynamic systems and controls. His current research interests are optimal and adaptive control, digital control, signal processing, motion control, and control problems related to robotics, machining, manufacturing, information storage devices and vehicles. He has published more than 400 papers in archival journals and refereed conference proceedings. He has supervised about 80 Ph. D. students to completion. Many of his students teach at national and international academic institutions and others work as leaders in various industries. He served as Technical Editor of the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control, J-DSMC (1988-93), Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (1997-99) and Associate Editor of the Journal of the International Federation of Automatic Control, Automatica (1993-99). He was General Chairman of the 1995 American Control Conference, and served as President of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) (1998-99). He is a Fellow of the ASME, the Institute of Electric and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He received the DSCD Outstanding Investigator Award (1996), the Pi Tau Sigma-ASME Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award (1997), the Oldenburger Medal (2002) and the John R. Ragazzini Award from AACC (2006).
One of the most challenging activity in Robotics consists in looking for new designs and new applications for robots and robotics systems. New fields of applications are characterized by specific requirements that existing robot solutions may not be able to fulfil and therefore specific investigations and design activity are required. In addition, new applications are often related with new potential users, who may have not suitable technical background and attitude for operating tasks in their professional area with robotic systems. New applications and new robotic systems are today mainly focused for service robots and medical assistance robots. Based on the experience on this recently developed area, problems and solutions can be considered and even conceived for additional new applications. One of the main problems consists in developing design solutions and operation modes of robots that can be accepted and used optimally by new users. In the speech, all these aspects will be surveyed as specifically referring to new cases for cable-based parallel manipulators in physiotherapy and robotic systems for monuments restoration as examples in which the author and his team are working with positive experiences and results. In the above-mentioned cases two different class of users, namely doctors & nursery and architects & archaeologists, are identified as requiring general new approach for robot operation. The objects of robot service, namely human limbs and artistic goods, will require specific care in the operation tasks and those aspects will define problems for design issues and operation practices. Solutions are proposed and discussed with low-cost features and user-oriented operation modes as they have been developed at LARM in Cassino with preliminary satisfactory results. Marco Ceccarelli was born in Rome in 1958. He received the mechanical engineer degree cum laude in 1982 at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome. At the same University he received a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mechanics in 1988. Since 1990 he teaches courses on Mechanics of Machinery and Mechanisms, and Mechanics of Robots at the School of Engineering at the University of Cassino. Since 1996 he is Director of LARM, the Laboratory of Robotics and Mechatronics of Department DiMSAT at the University of Cassino. Since 2001 he has been appointed Full Professor of Mechanics of Machinery and Mechanisms at the University of Cassino. From 2003 to 2005 he has been Vice Director of DiMSAT. He is member of ASME (The American Society of Mechanical Engineers), AEIM (Spanish Society of Mechanical Engineers), SIRI (Italian Association of Robotics and Automation), IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), FeIbIM (Iberoamerican Federation for Mechanical Engineering), AISI (Italian Society for the History of Engineering), GMA (Italian Group for Mechanics of Machinery). Since 2000 he is also member of the IFToMM Technical Committee for Robotics. Since 2002 he is Chairman of the Commission for Mechatronics of FeIbIM, Federaciòn Iberoamericana de Ingenieria Mecànica. He is the current Coordinator of the Scientific Committee for RAAD, International Workshops on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region. Since 2002 he is Chairman of the Scientific Committee of MUSME, IFToMM-FeIbIM International Conference on Mechatronics and Multibody Systems. He is member of scientific Committees for several conferences, like RAAD, Romansy, CK, and many others; he is associate editor for the journal Transactions of CSME (the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers), Journal Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines, International Journal of Mechanics and Control, and Journal Advanced Robotic Systems; he has served as associated editor for Mechanism and Machine Theory. He has written the book 'Fundamentals of Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation' published by Kluwer/Springer in 2004. In November 2003 he has received the Degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from UNI, National University of Lima, Perù, as recognizing his academic and scientific career, and his support to the activity of UNI in Mechatronic Engineering. He has been elected Secretary-General of IFToMM, the International Federation for the Promotion of Machine and Mechanism Science, for the term 2004-2007. He has been elected President of IFToMM for the term 2008-2011. His research interests cover aspects of Theory of Machines and Mechanisms (TMM) and Mechanics of Robots. Specific subjects of his interest are Analysis and Design of Workspace and Manipulation; Mechanical Design of Manipulators, Legged Robots, and Grippers; Mechanics of Grasp; History of TMM; and Mechanism Design. He is author or co-author of approximately four hundreds papers, which have been presented at Conferences or published in national and international journals. More information at the web page: http://webuser.unicas.it/weblarm/larmindex.htm.
Nowadays, network becomes the engine of scientific research activities in 21st century. For example, a Web search engine is something to do with networked data mining and knowledge discovery from networks in deed. Networks interact with one another and are recursive. We have come to grasp the important knowledge of networks. Deyi Li, was born in 1944 in Jiangsu, China, He graduated at the Electronic Engineering Dept.,South East Univ. in 1967, received his PhD in Computer Science Dept., Heriot-Watt Univ. Edinburgh UK in 1983. He was elected as the member of Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1999, the member of Eurosian Academy of Science in 2004 respectively. At present, he is a professor in Tsinghua Univ., the director at Dept. of Information Science, National Natural Science Foundation of China, the vice president of both Chinese Institute of Electronics and Chinese Association of Artificial Intelligence. He has published over 100 papers and 4 books, owned Premium Award given by IEE Headquarters 1984/85, and the IFAC world congress outstanding paper 1999, currently interested in data mining, artificial intelligence with uncertainty, soft computing, and cognitive physics. |
