Fumitoshi Matsuno

• Dr. Engineering
• Professor (Full) at Kyoto University

In soft robotics, it is desirable to be able to switch between two states, namely a soft state for adaptation to the environment and a rigid state for the transmission of forces. String jamming mechanisms, composed of bead-like connected units, have gained attention for their ability to switch between these states. This paper presents the design an...

In the face of humanitarian crises such as torrential rainfall, resulting floods, and landslides, rapid rescue operations are often imperative. However, owing to the inherent dangers and unpredictability of such circumstances, immediate on-site aid delivery is frequently unfeasible. In such challenging scenarios, mobile robot systems have emerged a...

Several methods have been developed in recent years to automatically design cable paths for a given robot motion. However, an optimal solution may not be found when applied to complex motions such as inspection or assembly processes. Observation of experts’ works reveals that multiple guides are empirically fixed on one link to avoid cable collisio...

We investigated the ability of two fingers to discriminate stiffness with stochastic resonance. It is known that the haptic perception at the fingertip improves when vibrotactile noise propagates to the fingertip, which is a phenomenon called the stochastic resonance. The improvement in the haptic sensation of a fingertip depends on the intensity o...

The morphology and controller design of robots is often a labor-intensive task performed by experienced and intuitive engineers. Automatic robot design using machine learning is attracting increasing attention in the hope that it will reduce the design workload and result in better-performing robots. Most robots are created by joining several rigid...

Several methods have been developed in recent years to automatically design cable paths for a given robot motion. However, an optimal solution may not be found when applied to complex motions such as inspection or assembly processes. Observation of experts’ works reveals that multiple guides are empirically fixed on one link to avoid cable collisio...

This article studies the appointed-time attitude tracking control of the spacecraft on the special orthogonal group, with the attitude forbidden zone, the parameter uncertainties, and the external disturbances. A novel projection function is proposed, such that the normalized boresight vector of the sensitive instrument is mapped to a reduced dimen...

This article introduces a recovery approach for a snake robot with multiple failed joints. The operational environments of snake robots are expected to cause high loads on the robot actuators, which may lead to the actuator malfunction problem. To solve this issue, we propose a recovery approach that enables a snake robot to restore its body shape...

In this study, we focus on the navigation of a robotic swarm and perform an experimental investigation. A decentralized control method using only local information has been proposed in many previous studies. However, because global coordinates are used and control input is calculated on a single PC in experiments, the system is regarded as partiall...

Quadruped animals exhibit high-performance locomotion using the degrees of freedom of the whole body. In this study, we developed a running robot based on the passive dynamical mechanism of a simple model of a quadruped. We developed a legged robot whose two-link hind leg behaves like a spring similar to the SLIP model. The robot experiment showed...

This paper proposes a method for the movement of a snake robot on crowded pipes or one with large branches. The robot moves along a pipe by grasping it with its entire body instead of wrapping around it, and it adjusts its body shape to the target curve. The proposed robot contains a part that does not contact the pipe, allowing it to move in two d...

This paper describes the design and performance evaluation of a flexible wearable haptic device that aims to realize full kinesthetic haptic feedback for application in robot-assisted surgery (RAS). Contrary to the existing practice, where the haptic feedback and leader—follower control are implemented in the same driver device, which leads to cont...

In this study, the stability of a sampled‐value control system with time‐ and state‐dependent disturbance and aperiodic sampling is investigated. To expand the application class of the sampled‐value controller, the local stability on a compact set is considered under the assumption of local Lipschitz continuity on the compact set. Because the assum...

The project "Informational system for management of flood and land slide disaster areas using a distributed heterogeneous robotic team" was initialized within international e-ASIA Joint Research Program and gathered research teams from Japan, Russia, and Thailand, each contributing unique experience and expertise toward achieving common research go...

This paper proposes a novel method to design a robot by simultaneously improving its morphology and controller. The number of rigid parts of the robot and the layout of joints connecting them are represented by a rooted tree, which is called a discrete parameter. Meanwhile, parameters that can be represented by real values are called continuous par...

This paper proposes a decentralized navigation method with collision avoidance for a robotic swarm whose individuals possess heterogeneous abilities, such as sensing range and maximum speed. In this method, each agent distributedly constructs and maintains a local directed connection with another agent using only local information, which is relativ...

Quadrupedal mammals have fore-aft asymmetry in their body structure, which affects their walking and running dynamics. However, the effects of asymmetry, particularly in the transverse plane, remain largely unclear. In this study, we examined the effects of fore-aft asymmetry on quadrupedal trotting in the transverse plane from a dynamic viewpoint...

Reconfigurable modular robots have the potential to achieve a range of tasks by changing their physical configuration. To identify a suitable configuration, the use of libraries has been suggested. However, such libraries usually assume centralized control, and developing a hardware-dependent library for all assumed tasks may be impractical. In thi...

This article studies the min-consensus control of continuous-time real-valued multiagent systems, with sampled information, quantized communication, and switching topologies. Due to the limited bandwidth of the digital communication network, only finite-bit binary symbolic sequence can be exchanged among the agents. In order to realize the min-cons...

This paper studies an adaptive coverage control problem for a system of multiple car-like mobile robots. The Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) is applied to generate an optimal coverage configuration of the multi-agent system for a dynamic region. A function approximation technique based immersion and invariance (FATII) controller is proposed t...

Cheetahs are the fastest land animal. Their galloping shows three characteristics: small vertical movement of their center of mass, small whole-body pitching movement, and large spine bending movement. We hypothesize that these characteristics lead to enhanced gait performance in cheetahs, including higher gait speed. In this study, we used a simpl...

Horses use the transverse gallop in high-speed running. However, different animals use different gaits, and the gait preference of horses remains largely unclear. Horses have fore-aft asymmetry in their body structure and their center of mass (CoM) is anteriorly located far from the center of the body. Since such a CoM offset affects the running dy...

Snake robots have shown significant locomotion abilities in various challenging environments. Therefore, they are considered good candidates for search-and-rescue and inspection applications. Their expected working environment may cause the problem of actuator malfunction, which in turn leads to task failure. As actuator replacement or maintenance...

The production line engineer's task of designing the external path for cables feeding electricity, air, and other resources to robot arms is a labor-intensive one. As the motions of robot arms are complex, the manual task of designing their cable path is a time-consuming and continuous trial-and-error process. Herein, we propose an automatic optimi...

The 3D reconstruction of objects and depth extraction is inevitable for autonomous surveillance and mobile robot navigation in Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) missions, which can be executed with the help of high-end sensors and cameras which elevates the overall operation cost. When it comes to hazardous unknown environment missions t...

This study defined the problem of motion planning for multiple unmanned tracked robots that minimize energy consumption in terrain with obstacles. The energy consumption of a DC motor is widely known to be dependent on its angular speed and acceleration. The transnational velocity and acceleration of a robot are controlled by the angular speed and...

This paper proposes a decentralized method for navigation of multiple robots, each of which has different abilities, by a single leader robot in 3D space, especially focusing on the connectivity maintenance. We assume a swarm of robots whose sensing ranges, maximum speeds and maximum accelerations are different. For such robots, we propose a contro...

This book presents the state of the art in distributed autonomous systems composed of multiple robots, robotic modules, or robotic agents. Swarms in nature can not only adapt to their environments, but can also construct suitable habitats to their own advantage. Distributed autonomous robotic systems can do many things that its individuals cannot d...

Although industrial robotic arms are equipped with external cables to supply electricity, gases or other materials, cable path design is a difficult and demanding task. Herein, an efficient optimization method is proposed for automating cable path design under the assumption that the robot motion path is known. The contribution of this study was to...

The snake robot, which mimics the mechanism of real snakes, is expected to be used in various environments. This article addresses the challenge of snake robots autonomously adapting to and moving inside and outside pipes having complex shapes using a helical rolling motion. We consider that an irregular helical form can be defined as a combination...

In the recently growing field of virtual reality, the virtual grasping sensation remains in its infancy, and the discrepancy between real and virtual grasping has become a problem. This article develops a new haptic glove that presents the sensation of different types of grasping (e.g., power/precision/intermediate grasping) a compliant object. To...

This article proposes a local input‐to‐state stability (LISS) analysis as a practical stability analysis approach. In existing LISS analysis approaches, a region including a state trajectory is not specified, and the decrement of a Lyapunov function must be guaranteed in the entire domain of the system state. This reduces the advantage of LISS by l...

We apply dynamic event-triggered control to a general linear multiagent system. On the basis of output feedback, a decentralized dynamic event-triggered controller is proposed for each agent to achieve consensus. No agent requires continuous communication, and it is sufficient for an agent to continuously observe its own states and broadcast them t...

Real-time global path planning in a large-scale dynamic environment for mobile robots is a complex task, especially when the 3-D configurations of the mobile robots and obstacles are considered. There is an existing method for real-time path planning for fixed manipulators in a small field that uses a parallel version of 3-D collision detection to...

Snake robots have shown limited ability to perform manipulation tasks in comparison to their locomotion capabilities. In this article, we propose a mobile manipulation approach that increases the manipulation ability of snake robots by using their full-body motion. We consider a snake robot that moves along the outer surface of a pipe using the hel...

Multi-legged animals show several types of ipsilateral interlimb coordination. Millipedes use a direct-wave gait, in which the swing leg movements propagate from posterior to anterior. In contrast, centipedes use a retrograde-wave gait, in which the swing leg movements propagate from anterior to posterior. Interestingly, when millipedes walk in a s...

The current methods of water quality monitoring tend to be costly, labor-intensive, and off-site. Also, they are not energetically sustainable and often require environmentally damaging power sources such as batteries. Microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology is a promising sustainable alternative to combat these issues due to its low cost, eco-friendl...

In the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aerial manipulations are receiving considerable attention because of their potential application to tasks such as pick and place, detection, and inspection. However, short flight endurance times and concerns about the safety to surroundings during interacting heavily limit the expansion of aerial man...

Cheetahs use a galloping gait in their fastest speed range. It has been reported that cheetahs achieve high-speed galloping by performing two types of flight through spine movement (gathered and extended). However, the dynamic factors that enable cheetahs to incorporate two types of flight while galloping remain unclear. To elucidate this issue fro...

The current practice of administering neurofeedback using the patients visual and/or auditory channel(s) is known to cause fatigue, excessive boredom, and restricted mobility during prolonged therapy sessions. This paper proposes haptics as an alternative means to provide neurofeedback and investigates its effectiveness by conducting two user studi...

In the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), quadrotors are receiving considerable attention because of their potential application to industries such as transportation, inspection, and search and rescue. One of the key challenges is to robustly control the position and attitude of a UAV amid the mass and inertia uncertainties, as well as the e...

A unified method for designing the motion of a snake robot negotiating complicated pipe structures is presented. Such robots moving inside pipes must deal with various “obstacles,” such as junctions, bends, diameter changes, shears, and blockages. To surmount these obstacles, we propose a method that enables the robot to adapt to multiple pipe stru...

In this work we present a soft crawler fabricated using a magneto-active elastomer. The crawler is controlled by an external magnetic field to produce two locomotion patterns: peristaltic and caterpillar crawling. Due to its structural simplicity, low mass, wirelessly controlled actuation and compliant body the design of this crawler has the potent...

We propose a method of controlling the formation in a multiagent system using partial differential equations (PDEs). In this method, the behavior of the entire multiagent system is modeled by second-order or higher order PDEs. We also propose a boundary controller that exponentially stabilizes the PDE model. By discretizing the PDE model under the...

A snake robot performs diverse motions. To realize a wide range functions in a complex environment, it is necessary to transition between various motions suited to each environment. In this article, we propose a method of transitioning the motion of a snake robot across different environments to expand the application environment of the robot. We f...

Point cloud information is a convenient means to accomplish grasp detection in autonomous robotic grasping. However, the performance of various state-of-the-art grasp detection methods that use point cloud decreases significantly when the available point cloud information is incomplete and the background is complex, i.e. heterogeneous. To solve thi...

In this paper, we propose two control methods for driving a power-assisted cart made for walking assistance for the elderly. The optimal assistance ratio (OAR) and disturbance observer-based (DOB) methods properly adjust the motor output of the cart with high operational efficiency in response to changes in the environment. Healthy subjects walked...

This paper proposes a method to improve the tactile sensitivity of the fingertip by placing multiple vibrators at a remote position away from the fingertip. It is known that a fingertip’s tactile sensitivity improves when vibrotactile noise is applied to the fingertip or to a position away from the fingertip, such as the wrist. This is the applicat...

This study discusses a cooperative control problem of a flexible beam by two planar space robots. The goal is to control the position and orientation of the flexible structure and robots, and to suppress the vibration of the flexible structure. To solve this problem, a boundary controller based on a dynamic model represented by a hybrid PDE‐ODE mod...

We propose a new simplified model for the control design of snake robots and apply it to a path-following control design using model predictive control (MPC). While MPC has an advantage in that inequality constraints can be explicitly considered in control design, most of the previous simplified models are still too complex to apply to MPC since th...

This paper discusses a grasping, orientation, and position control of an object by two flexible arms modeled by the Timoshenko beam. By utilizing our previously proposed controller for the cooperative control, we realize to control the grasping force, orientation, and position of an object as well as to suppress the vibration of the flexible arms....

We address a cooperative transport control problem involving three or more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We realize the transportation of an object that cannot be carried with a small number of UAVs. To improve scalability and real-time performance, we propose a controller that does not require optimization calculations. The attitude and positio...

To learn motor skills using a finger in many haptic training systems, a user places his or her finger in a holder to communicate with a haptic interface. It is known that the force-detection capability at the fingertip is reduced when the user's finger is enclosed in a holder. The learning performance might therefore be impaired in training. Stocha...

The paper presents a motion which allows a snake robot to climb a vertical pipe without all round winding. When climbing a pipe, the target shape of the robot consists of a part that touches the pipe and a part that does not touch the pipe. Furthermore, a unique motion of a snake robot called rolling is used. In addition, the problem that the robot...

3D SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is a technique for creating circumstance maps which are usable for measuring the environments and providing navigation information. One of the problems in 3D SLAM is computational efficiency of inserting new points into the circumstance map, since the efficiency is essential for keeping the quality an...

Snake robots are capable of adapting to difficult situations, such as cluttered environments, using its many degrees of freedom. However, if one of the joints gets passive, it is generally very difficult to achieve ordinary performance. In this paper, control of a passive joint using rolling motion is considered, with the use of crawler gait in min...

This paper presents a stability analysis of swarm robots, a group of multiple robots. In particular, we focus on robot swarms with heterogeneous abilities, in which each robot has a different sensing range and physical limitations, including maximum velocity and acceleration. In addition, each robot has a unique sensing region with a limited angle...

Stable and robust path planning of a ground mobile robot requires a combination of accuracy and low latency in its state estimation. Yet, state estimation algorithms should provide these under computational and power constraints of a robot embedded hardware. The presented study offers a comparative analysis of four cutting edge publicly available w...

This paper focuses on Stochastic Resonance (SR) for stiffness discrimination by two fingers. In particular, we show that the sub-threshold vibrotactile noise applied on a remote position can improve tactile sensations of both index finger and thumb for a task requiring multiple fingers. We evaluate the user performances in a virtual environment (VE...

In this paper, we consider autonomous navigation of a wheeled mobile robot in a dynamic environment using a 3D point cloud map. We consider four kinds of 2D maps: static global map, dynamic global map, global cost map, and local cost map; to plan a feasible path of the robot to adapt to a dynamic environment. We consider a mobile robot for plant pa...

Because robotic experiments are often expensive in time and/or money, it is a common idea to use simulations instead of real robot experiments to have a robot acquire a motion through reinforcement learning. However, simulation models inevitably have some modeling errors, because of which the solution can be an inappropriate one for the real robot....

To date, many gait generation strategies have been designed for robots with leg configurations that model those of natural creatures. However, their leg configurations are limited to the $2\times N$ type, such as hexapod or myriapod; hence, simultaneously, the potential ability of legged robots is implicitly limited. We consider single-legged mod...

Quadruped animals use not only their legs but also their trunks during walking and running. Although many previous studies have investigated the flexion, extension, and lateral bending of the trunk, few studies have investigated the body torsion, and its dynamic effects on locomotion thus remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the effects o...

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a useful but challenging surgical technique. Several robotic manipulators have been realized in the past three decades to overcome its difficulties. However, a majority of these manipulators lack two important features: (i) the ability to provide a right-angled tool entry (with respect to the surrounding skin tis...

In disturbance observer (DO)‐based control, control input attenuates a disturbance using observer output. Thus, the input may not achieve the attenuation if the input term includes uncertainty. Therefore, in order to correctly suppress the disturbance, it is essential to consider the uncertainty existing in the input term, and thus this article foc...

Path integral policy improvement (PI <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) is known to be an efficient reinforcement learning algorithm, particularly, if the target system is a high-dimensional dynamical system. However, PI <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:x...

Self-organizing biological systems, such as colonies of social insects, are characterized by their decentralized control and flexible responses to changing environments, often likened to swarm intelligence. Although decentralized control is well known to be a product of local interactions among agents, without the need for a bird's-eye view, indire...

This paper deals with contact-force control of a one-link flexible arm whose tip is constrained to a rigid environment. To realize the contact-force control, a boundary controller is proposed based on a dynamic model represented by an infinite dimensional model. In particular, the proposed controller does not need the physical parameters in its imp...

Quadruped gallop is categorized into two types: rotary and transverse. While the rotary gallop involves two types of flight with different spine movements, the transverse gallop involves only one type of flight. The rotary gallop can achieve faster locomotion than the transverse gallop. To clarify these mechanisms from a dynamic viewpoint, we devel...

Many countries suffer from various natural disasters, including heavy rains, that are associated with further flood and landslide disasters. Based on our experiences of different disasters response, we develop a joint international operation framework for a disaster site management with distributed heterogeneous robotic teams that consist of unmann...

The paper presents an interface system which locally changes a posture of an articulated mobile robot. In the system, we assign two points in the robot’s body, one is the base point, and the other is the controlled point. In addition, we set the position of the target point in the system. The robot can locally change its form by controlling the joi...

Robots offer a great possibility to be used for the monitoring of industrial and farming underwater environments, such as an aquaponics system. A current challenge is to create relatively small, autonomous, swarm-capable and adaptable systems. To achieve these objectives, we present Aquabot, a robot that features a modular structure designed for fu...

Robots are needed in rescue activities and the inspection of infrastructure. We developed the rescue robot FUHGA2 so that it has various functions. FUHGA2 has high mobility, with main crawlers covering the body and four sub-crawlers, high dexterity using a long six-axis arm, and high searching ability using various sensors. Furthermore, a novel par...

Thermo-active hydrogels can produce energy-autonomous action by responding to thermal changes in their environment. This mimics actuation mechanisms seen in plants such as the moisture-response of pinecone scales. The lack of a simple force-characterization method means that gels are rarely used in robotic systems and hinders the adoption of new, l...

The stability of two one‐link flexible arms for grasping and orientation control of an object is studied. Flexible arms are modelled by Euler–Bernoulli beam model and the overall system is represented by a hybrid partial differential equation (PDE)–ordinary differential equation (ODE) model. The authors' primary concern is the stability analysis of...

We propose a control method in which an articulated wheeled mobile robot moves inside straight, curved and branched pipes. This control method allows the articulated wheeled mobile robot to inspect a larger area. The articulated wheeled mobile robot comprises pitch and yaw joints is and propelled by active wheels attached to the robot. Via the prop...

This paper introduces a new indoor environment exploration method, which is designed to consider robot sensory perception constraints and indoor spaces predictable structure. Our new method is compared with a greedy approach exploration. The two algorithms were implemented and tested in simulation and in real-world experiments with a Russian Servos...

This paper focuses on grasping and manipulation of an object by two one-link flexible arms. By taking rolling constraints between the arm tip and grasped object, the arms have the potential to grasp and manipulate an object at the same time. To realize grasping and manipulation by two flexible arms, a boundary controller is derived from a Lyapunov...

Quadruped robots experience excessive vibrations in the roll direction when turning by controlling their hip yaw joint. In the case of image-based teleoperation of the robot, the operator cannot aware the situation of the robot, due to excessive vibrations of the viewpoint of the image from the camera mounted on the robot. Especially, it is known t...

Many plants exhibit actuation in response to environmental stimuli; osmotic influx and efflux of water due to environmental changes in temperature and humidity causes cells to swell and contract. Hydrogels are superabsorbent networked polymers containing hydrophilic units. The large strains produced by hydrogels on the absorption of water resembles...

Grounding of kinesthetic feedback against a user's hand can increase the portability and wearability of a haptic device. However, the effects of different hand-grounding locations on haptic perception of a user are unknown. In this letter, we investigate the effects of three different hand-grounding locations-back of the hand, proximal phalanx of t...

Many localization methods have been proposed for an autonomous mobile robot and many studies focus on enhancement of capability of each means. Monte Carlo localization such as particle filter has good robustness and widely used for mobile robots but lacks precise estimation in a certain environment. ICP(Iterative Closest Points) matching has good p...

The use of hydrogel actuators in soft robotics is challenging due to the fragility and limited commercial availability of synthesized hydrogels. Current research on hydrogel actuators is predominantly focused on actuating monolithic, unprotected gels with low suitability for practical robotics applications. In contrast, we present the design and te...

In the field of aerial robotics, physical interaction with the surrounding environment is currently receiving a considerable attention. One of the key challenges is to control not only the position, but also the force exerted by the end-effector while performing complex tasks such as object manipulation, inspection, and assembly/disassembly. To mee...

Планирование пути для автономных мобильных устройств является важной задачей в робототехнике. При планировании пути принято использовать один из двух классических подходов: глобальный, когда карта полностью известна, и локальный, в котором устройство по мере движения обнаруживает препятствия с помощью различных бортовых датчиков. На основе этих дву...