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Pose tracking for outdoor rovers is generally a complex task which is further complicated in conditions where a Global Positioning System (GPS) signal is denied such as in planetary exploration, underground mines and covered areas. In these conditions the rover's pose needs to be calculated purely based on the rover's current environment observations. However, conventional wheel odometry is not reliable...
Unmanned rescue, observation, and/or research vehicles with high terrain adaptability, high speed, and high reliability are needed in difficult-to-reach locations. However, for most vehicles, high performance over rough terrain reduces the travel speed and/or requires complex mechanisms. We have developed a blade-type crawler robot with a very simple and reliable mechanism, which traverses uneven...
In this paper we present a new Associative Memory (AM) chip designed in the 28 nm TSMC HPL technology. Two of the main characteristics of the new chip are reduced power consumption and an increased memory cell area density by the use of two newly designed memory cell technologies. The aim of the new chip is to test the new technologies with realistic front-end functions. The integration of the AM...
For planetary exploration, small robots of just a few kilograms installed in the main spacecraft have a lot of advantages. Small robots can provide us with a wide range of exploration opportunities by using multi-robots, technical demonstrations, and science missions which require detailed data acquisition. There are not only mission advantages, but they can also be developed in a short period of...
A chip stacking process technology using high mass productivity non-conductive film (NCF) has been developed, with assumptions for the central processing unit (CPU) in high-end servers. With this process, a 23 mm by 23 mm chip with a bump pitch of 40 μm was successfully stacked onto another, and 296,000 bumps were jointed in total. In the development of the chip stacking process, in order to measure...
In recent years, such small body exploration missions as asteroids or comets have received remarkable attention in the world. In small body explorations, especially, detailed in-situ surface exploration by tiny rover is one of effective and fruitful means and is expected to make strong contributions towards scientific studies. Performance of mobility on surface explorer is highly dependent on the...
Conventional (usually used) Doppler sonar, though unlimited by velocity range ambiguity, takes seconds to return valuable velocity readings. Coherent Doppler sonar has been proposed to provide accurate velocity with short time lag for current or turbulent. However the velocity ambiguity seriously limits its general application. In this paper, combined Doppler sonar is proposed to overcome the disadvantages...
Difficult conditions on outdoor terrains make outdoor autonomy for rovers, a challenging task. The conventional wheel odometry method uses orientation measurements to assume a momentary plane to apply wheel encoder readings. On uneven terrains, this method often gives poor results for position tracking, and therefore rarely used. To improve the conventional odometry motion model, immediate terrain...
Recently, personal vehicles have received a lot of attention to expand our mobility for low carbon society and diversification of individual mobility. So far several small vehicles have been developed. However a new thesis of designing and controlling personal vehicles is required, because there are some difference between general vehicle-used environment and personal vehicle-used environment like...
This paper proposes a novel method to estimate relative poses for a calibrated stereo camera. Three corresponding points in 3D space are theoretically required to recover unconstraint motion which has six degrees of freedom. The proposed method solves this problem with only two 3D points by exploiting a common reference direction between poses. Two points are selected in accordance with the distance...
Recently personal vehicles have received a lot of attention to expand our mobility for low carbon society and diversification of individual mobility. So far several small vehicles have been developed. However a new thesis of designing and controlling personal vehicles is required, because there are some difference between general vehicle-used environment and personal vehicle-used environment like...
To elucidate planetary origins and develop suitable bases for human operations, the subsurface of the planets must be investigated. Previously, we have developed a planetary subsurface excavation robot with the peristaltic crawling mechanism. This robot consists of two units; a propulsion unit and an excavation unit. The propulsion unit operates by peristaltic motion of three subunits, while the excavation...
Recently planetary exploration that has gathered great attention has a possibility to find trace of life, new substances and origin of our planet especially underground. We have therefore developed a planetary subsurface explorer robot with propulsion and excavation units. The prototype robot demonstrated excellent excavation performance. However, both units have been separately controlled to achieve...
In recent years, small body exploration missions have received a lot of attention. JAXA completed Hayabusa mission in 2010 and succeeded in getting samples from the asteroid. JAXA is also developing the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, the post sample return mission to a near-earth asteroid. A novel and tiny hopping rover called MINERVA was installed into Hayabusa spacecraft. Then, with these experiences, some...
Subsurface exploration is required to obtain resources such as oil and minerals, and to construct buildings and houses. It would also be necessary in any future expansion of human activity on the Moon or other planets. We have developed a small unmanned planetary subsurface explorer suitable for nascent stages of exploration. The subsurface excavator consists of both propulsion and excavation units,...
Today, because of spread of large-scale indoor environment (e.g. shopping male, university and airport), personal vehicle to expand our mobility is needed. In this research, we especially focused on psychological status of driver and body sway to estimate driver's psychological status using body sway of drivers. In this paper, we investigate relationship between trans-velocity of vehicle and body...
This paper proposes an intuitive teleoperation scheme by using human gesture in conjunction with multimodal human-robot interface. Further, in order to deal with the complication of dynamic daily environment, the authors apply haptic point cloud rendering and the virtual collaboration to the system. all these functions are achieved by a portable hardware that is proposed by authors newly, which is...
We present a intuitive teleoperation scheme by using human gesture and multimodal multi-user human-robot interface. Further, in order to deal with the dynamic daily environment, we apply haptic point cloud rendering and virtual collaboration and all these functions are achieved by portable hardwares which is called “mobile iSpace”. First, a surrounding environment of a teleoperated robot is captured...
Various kinds of space explorations have been done for decades in order to understand the origin of the solar system and life as well as to seek natural resources in space. Especially, rover missions which can perform detailed planetary surface exploration are under planning around the world. However, rover mission still has difficulty in its autonomy in spite of its potential expectation. This paper...
Rovers are one of the most important mission devices for planetary exploration. The Lnar rovers are required to move on rough terrains such as in craters and rear cliffs where it is scientifically very important to explore. Recently, wheel typed rovers are popular for planetary exploration missions. However, there is a problem that the wheel typed rovers have possibility of stack. Because the ground...
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