並木 明夫

To achieve robotic manipulation tasks in the real world in which there are dynamic changes in an environment, we have developed a high-speed sensory-motor fusion system consisting of a multiprocessor system, a massively parallel active vision, and a multifingered hand-arm. This 1-ms sensory-motor fusion system has the following three features: 1) 1-ms high-speed visual and force feedback to deal with changes in the real world environment; 2) heterogeneous sensor fusion to process a multiple environments; and 3) hierarchical parallel processing architecture to perform multiple tasks. These features allow dynamic motion in the real-world environment.

An attempt was made to develop a prototype of a master-slave manipulation system with a force-feedback function for use in remote endoscopic surgery. It was shown that the slave manipulator accurately and quickly mimics the movement of the master manipulator, with the reaction force generated at the master manipulator also reproducing well the force that was actually applied to the slave manipulator.

この問題に対して, メスやピンセット等の作業ツール自体にアクチュエータを備えることで, 能動的に作業支援を行うツールの開発が行われている。しかし, それらの研究では, ツール内部アクチュエータの力覚を用いた局所的な制御が行われるに止まっているため, 外科手術環境のように, 柔軟で変形しやすい物体が多い作業環境においては, 安全性等の面から, これらのツールをそのまま応用することは困難であった。そこで, 本研究では, 視覚による実時間でのグローバル情報の獲得が可能な作業環境と, 多自由度を持ち汎用の動作が可能な力覚を装備した小型のツールを組み合わせることにより, 実環境の実時間での変化に適応した実作業支援システムを構築する。

Decentralized control is more efficient for the system composed of the interconnected subsystems than centralized control, because decentralized control is considered to have fault-tolerance property. But several assumptions are needed to stabilize the decentralized control system, and system may not be robust to changes of parameters. Therefore the adaptive type decentralized controller is proposed. However its assumption is so strict that it is difficult to be applied actually. In this paper, we relax the assumption that the relative degree of each subsystem should be one. And we study on the stabilizability and fault tolerance property of the system in which each subsystem has direct paths from input to output.