Kazutoshi Tanaka

OMRON SINIC X Corporation

Understanding decision-making processes is informative for strategic planning. Aiming to understand human risk-taking behavior in decision-making, we investigate the possibility of classifying whether a shot is offensive or not, targeting table tennis videos. We define the problem in a multi-task setting: detecting shots with frame-level precision...

In human-robot interaction (HRI) research, ball games pose significant challenges that demand robotic solutions that are both cost-effective and user-friendly for non-experts. Air hockey, characterized by safe, non-direct-contact play and a simplified state-action space, emerges as an ideal platform for such research. Despite the availability of va...

Tactile perception is vital, especially when distinguishing visually similar objects. We propose an approach to incorporate tactile data into a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for visuo-tactile zero-shot object recognition. Our approach leverages the zero-shot capability of VLMs to infer tactile properties from the names of tactilely similar objects. T...

Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the development of language-guided robot planners. Meanwhile, symbolic planners offer the advantage of interpretability. This paper proposes a new task that bridges these two trends, namely, multimodal planning problem specification. The aim is to generate a problem description (PD), a machine-readable...

Imitation learning (IL) is a promising method for programming dual-arm manipulation easily by imitating demonstrations from human experts. However, IL for dual- arm manipulation is still challenging because operating two robotic arms to collect demonstrations requires considerable effort. Therefore, we present a novel IL framework for dual-arm mani...

This study focuses on a robotic powder weighing task used in laboratory automation. In this task, a robot weighs a certain amount of powder with a milligram-level target mass using a dispensing spoon. The complex dynamics of the powder, the variations in the materials being weighed, and the need to balance conservative and aggressive actions are si...

This study aims to achieve autonomous robotic assembly under uncertain conditions arising from imprecise goal positioning and variations in the angle of the grasped part. Soft robots are suitable for such uncertain and contact-rich environments and are capable of insertion tasks with imprecise goal positions. However, we may also struggle to handle...

This study focuses on the powder grinding process, which is a necessary step for material synthesis in materials science experiments. In material science, powder grinding is a time-consuming process that is typically executed by hand, as commercial grinding machines are unsuitable for samples of small size. Robotic powder grinding would solve this...

This study focuses on the powder grinding process, which is a necessary step for material synthesis in materials science experiments. In material science, powder grinding is a time-consuming process that is typically executed by hand, as commercial grinding machines are unsuitable for samples of small size. Robotic powder grinding would solve this...

Human behaviors, with whole-body coordination, involve large-scale sensorimotor interaction. Spontaneous bodily movements in the early developmental stage potentially lead toward acquisition of such coordinated behavior. These movements presumably contribute to the structuration of sensorimotor interaction, providing specific regularities in bidire...

Contact-rich manipulation is challenging due to dynamically-changing physical constraints by the contact mode changes undergone during manipulation. This paper proposes a versatile local planning and control framework for contact-rich manipulation that determines the continuous control action under variable contact modes online. We model the physic...

ontact-rich manipulation is challenging due to dynamically-changing physical constraints by the contact mode changes undergone during manipulation. This paper proposes a versatile local planning and control framework for contactrich manipulation that determines the continuous control action under variable contact modes online. We model the physical...

Soft continuum arms have significant potential for use in various applications due to their extremely high degrees of freedom. For example, these soft arms can be used for grasping and manipulating fragile materials in the deep sea or carrying a human to rescue in unstructured environments. However, in these situations, the environment is often dar...

Factory automation robot systems often depend on specially-made jigs that precisely position each part, which increases the system's cost and limits flexibility. We propose a method to determine the 3D pose of an object with high precision and confidence, using only parallel robotic grippers and no parts-specific jigs. Our method automatically gene...

Grinding materials into a fine powder is a time-consuming task in material science that is generally performed by hand, as current automated grinding machines might not be suitable for preparing small-sized samples. This study presents a robotic powder grinding system for laboratory automation in material science applications that observe the powde...

This study aimed to anticipate fractures of fragile food during robotic food manipulation. Anticipating fractures allows a robot to manipulate ingredients without irreversible failure. Food fracture models investigated in food texture fields explain the properties of fragile objects well. However, they may not directly apply to robot manipulation d...

Soft materials generate rich and diverse dynamics that can be used as computational resources based on the framework of physical reservoir computing. Herein, a method that exploits the dynamic coupling between soft structures and a water medium to allow for the transfer of computation to spatially distant locations is proposed. This technique is im...

Robotic contact juggling is a challenging task in which robots must control the movement of a ball rapidly and indirectly without holding it while keeping the ball in and sometimes out of contact with the robot's body. In this work, we address the problem of learning such robotic contact juggling from trial and error via model-based reinforcement l...

Practical industrial assembly scenarios often require robotic agents to adapt their skills to unseen tasks quickly. While transfer reinforcement learning (RL) could enable such quick adaptation, much prior work has to collect many samples from source environments to learn target tasks in a model-free fashion, which still lacks sample efficiency on...

This letter focuses on the jump-and-hit motion of a humanoid robot, wherein a robot instantaneously jumps forward and hits a flying ball in the air, similar to how human players behave in volleyball games. We propose a Immediate Motion generation using a Lookup table of learned dynamics (IMoLo) for generating the motions of a pneumatic humanoid rob...

In this study, we developed a novel learning framework from physical human-robot interactions. Owing to human domain knowledge, such interactions can be useful for facilitation of learning. However, applying numerous interactions for training data might place a burden on human users, particularly in real-world applications. To address this problem,...

The recent growth of robotic manipulation has resulted in the realization of increasingly complicated tasks, and various kinds of learning-based approaches for planning or control have been proposed. However, learning-based approaches which can be applied to multiple environments are still an active topic of research. In this study, we aim to reali...

In this paper, we present a diabolo model that can be used for training agents in simulation to play diabolo, as well as running it on a real dual robot arm system. We first derive an analytical model of the diabolo-string system and compare its accuracy using data recorded via motion capture, which we release as a public dataset of skilled play wi...

Flapping‐wing unmanned aerial vehicles have potential advantages, such as consuming lower energy by leveraging the force of wind. Since the flapping movements of the soft wings contain information about the wind, measuring the movement of each part of the wings allows these vehicles to distinguish the direction of the wind. To confirm this predicti...

Physical softness has been proposed to absorb impacts when establishing contact with a robot or its workpiece, to relax control requirements and improve performance in assembly and insertion tasks. Previous work has focused on special end effector solutions for isolated tasks, such as the peg-in-hole task. However, as many robot tasks require the p...

Physically soft robots are promising for robotic assembly tasks as they allow stable contacts with the environment. Meanwhile, designing appropriate controllers is still challenging due to the difficulty of modeling contact-rich soft body interactions. In this study, we propose a novel learning system for soft robotic assembly strategies. We formul...

In this study, we present a novel control framework for assembly tasks with a soft robot. Typically, existing hard robots require high frequency controllers and precise force/torque sensors for assembly tasks. The resulting robot system is complex, entailing large amounts of engineering and maintenance. Physical softness allows the robot to interac...

In industrial assembly tasks, the position of an object grasped by the robot has to be known with high precision in order to insert or place it. In real applications, this problem is commonly solved by jigs that are specially produced for each part. However, they significantly limit flexibility and are prohibitive when the target parts change often...

We describe the development of a robot configured to play badminton, a dynamic sport that requires high accuracy. We used pneumatic-electric hybrid actuators, each combining a pneumatic actuator, with high-speed and lightweight attributes, and an electric motor with good controllability. Our first objective was to develop hybrid actuators that are...

In recent years, reinforcement learning has developed rapidly with deep learning and achieves great performance not only in the game playing but also in the continuous control of robots. Reinforcement learning requires exploratory behavior, and action noise is widely used to realize it. Recent researches have tackled exploration problems in deep re...

This paper proposes an exploration method for deep reinforcement learning based on parameter space noise. Recent studies have experimentally shown that parameter space noise results in better exploration than the commonly used action space noise. Previous methods devised a way to update the diagonal covariance matrix of a noise distribution and did...

Sports, especially badminton, require participants to perform dynamic and skillful motions. Previous robots have had difficulty in performing like a human because of their severe limitations of low operating speed, heavy bodies, and simplistic mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new robot design that consists of a structure integrated with pneu...

Badminton needs dynamic and high speed motion, so previous humanoid robots were difficult to perform like human. For entertaining or training humanoid badminton robot in the future, we propose new robot arm which consists of structure integrated pneumatic cable cylinder and noninterfering many DoFs joints. We made a real robot arm with high acceler...

Humanoid robots must execute situation-adaptive whole-body dynamic movements to protect humans. However, design of such robots have been unclear. Thus, our aim is to clarifying a design method of a robot executing a jump-hit motion representing these movements. For such a robot, we developed a light, high power and large stroke pneumatic actuation...

For social advancement of robots, robots using deformable objects as tool similar to the rigid tools are important. In a prior research, robots used deformable tool by iterative learning. And another research, robots manipulate a string using a complex deformable object model. However, it is important to succeed in one time trial and decreasing cal...

Rapid reacting motions are important for robots to adjust to changes in the real world, which is constantly changing drastically. Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) have been used as actuators of fast-moving robots. Robots equipped with PAMs can move adaptively and dynamically using passive properties of PAMs. In this study, we considered preparat...

Rapid reacting motions should be needed for robots working in human environments. Preliminary motions are expected to improve speed of such motions. Thus, we investigated preliminary motions in such complex environments. In this investigation, we calculated expected value of minimum time for state transition of a simple robotic arm model. In additi...

When robots make smooth transitions in dynamic motions, they must exert large force over widely various postures. To expand the range of postures that robots can take during dynamic motions, we propose that robots be designed with an Angle-Dependent Moment Arm (ADMA) with biased pivot, for which torque characteristics of actuators attached to joint...

Robots must complete motions in a short time in uncertain and variable real world environments. However, uncertainty in the real world has only rarely been considered in studies of agile motions by robots. Consequently, methods for agile motions incorporating uncertainty must be proposed. Preceding agile motions, human preparatory motions (prelimin...

Robots mimicking the structure of the musculoskeletal systems have been developed in order to realize high physical performance or to reveal the contribution of the musculoskeletal systems to body movements. The movement of center of rotation (CoR) of biological joints have been focused on in various research fields. However, to date, the isolated...

Visual attention of a robot has been realized by determining a fixation point in an image and focusing on the small area around the point. On the other hand, we are proposing an alternative visual attention method in which a robot does not determine a point of gaze in advance. In the method, two cameras are controlled in order to minimize an evalua...