Yohei Hoshino

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• PhD (Engineering) from Hokkaido University
• Vice President at Kitami Institute of Technology

This paper proposes a self localization method for autonomous vehicles with just a omni-directional camera. Proposed method uses positions and arrangement of landmarks which are preliminarily obtained, and estimates the position of omni-directional camera based on the cosine formula. Also measurements of distances between the camera and the landmar...

A force redistribution method for compensating actuator breakdown of vibration-isolation tables is studied. The vibration-isolation table is supported by eight pneumatic actuators and has a redundant number of actuators with respect to the degrees of freedom of table motion. We propose a force redistribution method that utilizes the redundancy of t...

This study presents an Active Wheel Damper (AWD) unit that can be easily mounted on flexible structures such as cantilever beams. The AWD uses a gyro sensor to directly measure the absolute angular velocity, which is the rotational velocity of the slope angle of a deflection curve caused by the flexible vibration of the structure, and can be used t...

This paper presents the results of using mixed clustering (k-means and DBSCAN clustering) with singular value decomposition to build map in a noisy environment from laser range sensor information. Sensors are prone to errors, moreover, environmental and other factors may affect the sensor sensitivity. This may generate a lot of noise which must be...

This paper proposes the robust straight-path tracking control for the agricultural tractor based on Sliding-Mode Control (SMC) with considering drift skidding. This controller consists of a feedback controller of lateral error from the reference path and a yaw-rate servo controller which accurately and robustly achieves tractor yaw-rate to referenc...

In Japan, the decline in the number of agricultural workers and the aging of the workforce are problems, and there is a demand for more efficient and labor-saving work. Furthermore, in order to correct the rising price of fertilizer and the increasing burden on the environment caused by fertilizer, there is a demand for more efficient fertilization...

The decline in the number of essential farmers has become a significant issue in Japanese agriculture. In response, there is increasing interest in the electrification and automation of agricultural machinery, particularly in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study focuses on the development of an electric ve...

Harvesting grapes requires a large amount of manual labor. To reduce the labor force for the harvesting job, in this study, we developed a robot harvester for the vine grapes. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm that using multi-cameras, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) object detection methods, to detect the thin stem and decide the cut...

In Japan, the aging and decreasing number of agricultural workers is a significant problem. For wine grape harvesting, especially for large farming areas, there is physical strain to farmers. In order to solve this problem, this study focuses on developing an automated harvesting robot for wine grapes. The harvesting robot needs high dust, water, a...

In the sport of curling, various mechanisms in curl of rotating stones have been proposed; however, the essential understanding of the mechanism has not been clarified. In this study, we attempted to explain the curl of a rotating stone by focusing on the contact area between the stone and many small ice protrusions known as pebbles which artificia...

Since 2001, Robot-Triathlon, a robot contest for engineering university students in Hokkaido, have been started, and gathered the participants of around 30 teams regularly. Under Covid-19 catastrophe, the contest was canceled in 2020. However, in 2021, it was re-started using an online meeting service. This paper explains its outline, competition r...

In recent years, autonomous robots have extensively been used to automate several vineyard tasks. Autonomous navigation is an indispensable component of such field robots. Autonomous and safe navigation has been well studied in indoor environments and many algorithms have been proposed. However, unlike structured indoor environments, vineyards pose...

Vineyards which are situated in remote mountainous areas receive weak GPS signals. Mobile robots working in such vineyards needs special algorithms to navigate without using GPS information. In this paper, we propose an algorithm of autonomous mobile robot navigation which uses only the local features of the vineyard. The algorithm only uses data f...

This research develops an algorithm that generates an optimal travel path by introducing turning paths using relaxation curves. The travel path for a GNSS-based automatic steered tractor have to be generated with taking the tractor's travel characteristics into account. The algorithm can be applied to the field of the shape without discontinuous si...

Most of the current autopilot technologies for agricultural tractors use Real Time Kinematic-Global Navigation Satellite System (RTK-GNSS) that provides positioning accuracy of several centimeters. However, the positioning accuracy of GNSS can be degraded in the area around near windbreaks or buildings. This paper proposes an automatic steering sys...

In Hokkaido，the vegetable processing workers are getting older，and the shortage of manpower is becoming a problem. In particular, the process of peeling pumpkin and removing the leftover peel is labor-intensive，so there is a need to develop a pumpkin peel removal device to automate this process．In our previous research, the pumpkin surface peel rem...

This study investigates optimal arrangement of Active Wheel Dampers (AWDs) based on vibration control performance and static deflection amount when multiple AWDs are mounted on sprayer beam modeled as a cantilever beam. Static deflection amount is evaluated as the sum of static deflection amount depending on the gravity affecting on the cantilever...

In Japanese livestock farming, the number of cattle has been declining for 58 years with respect to both beef and dairy cattle due to the aging of the workforce and lack of successors. However, in terms of facilities and equipment for dairy farming, the introduction of milking robots and other have been actively promoted the scall up and automation...

The automatic pumpkin harvester is expected to be developed in order to solve the problem of the aging of farmers in Japan from the 2010s. This paper describes a newly designed grasping link-mechanism of a robot hand that will be utilized for automatic pumpkin harvesting. In order to develop the robot hand, the dimensions and weight data of pumpkin...

The autonomous driving tractors were developed and utilized in the fields for farming in recent years to solve the problem of the shortage of farmers in Japan. The global positing system (GPS) is mainly used for the autonomous driving system for which can provide absolute positioning information in the outdoor fields. However, in the conditions of...

Service robots are being used for tasks like cleaning and surveillance. These robots are expected to work continuously, and require frequent recharging. Automatic charging points are available but they are expensive and occupy space. We propose an algorithm to manage limited charging points with multiple robots. The proposed planner is designed to...

An intelligent cleaning robot for indoor environments is proposed. Traditional cleaning robots do not have access to real-time information about the room’s status. Hence, efficient dirt detection is not possible. We solve this problem through dirt detection using an external camera that can communicate with the robot. The external camera detects th...

In this paper, we propose a robust algorithm to detect landmarks in a vineyard field. The algorithm only uses image data from inexpensive web-camera sensor to accurately detect pillars supporting the grape plants in the presence of noise. Robust detection of these landmarks is important for the autonomous task execution by a robot in vineyards. The...

Service robots are expected to work in real world scenarios which are dynamic in nature. The traversable and non-traversable passages of the environment might change at different times. For example, it is common for some of the passages or areas in the map to be inaccessible due to cleaning, repair works, or other reasons. On the other hand, some p...

Autonomous mobile robots are being used to automate many tasks such as cleaning, delivering items, and surveillance. Such tasks often require uninterrupted and continuous service. However, robots have limited battery power and must be recharged frequently. Since manually charging each robot is not always feasible, automatic charging (docking) stati...

Many tasks involved in viticulture are labor intensive. Farmers frequently monitor the vineyard to check grape conditions, damage due to infections from pests and insects, grape growth, and to estimate optimal harvest time. Such monitoring is often done manually by the farmers. Manual monitoring of large vineyards is time and labor consuming proces...

Safe robot navigation in human-centered environments is important to avoid collisions. A major limitation of the traditional path planning algorithms is that the global path is planned only with the knowledge of static obstacles in the map. This paper presents a novel ‘HMRP (heat map-based robot path planner)’ which uses fixed external cameras to g...

In this paper, we propose a robust algorithm to detect landmarks in a vineyard field. The algorithm only uses data from laser range sensor to accurately detect pillars supporting the grape plants in the presence of noise. Robust detection of these landmarks is important for the autonomous task execution by a robot in vineyards. The detected pillars...

Safe mobile robot navigation is important in human-centered environments. This paper proposes to use fixed external cameras to estimate congestion in different passages. A heat map of the passages is generated for different times. The historical data of congestion is maintained in a database, and the paths are classified into hot regions with large...

In recent years, cleaning robots like Roomba have gained popularity. These cleaning robots have limited battery power, and therefore, efficient cleaning is important. Efforts are being undertaken to improve the efficiency of cleaning robots. Most of the previous works have used on-robot cameras, developed dirt detection sensors which are mounted on...

Navigation is an indispensable component of ground and aerial mobile robots. Although there is a plethora of path planning algorithms, most of them generate paths that are not smooth and have angular turns. In many cases, it is not feasible for the robots to execute these sharp turns, and a smooth trajectory is desired. We present `ITC: Infused Tan...

In modern agriculture, many advanced automated devices are used on farms. To improve the working efficiency of agricultural vehicles, fields are expected to be pre-leveled, because the vehicles work more effectively on a flat field. Leveling a field requires the current field elevation map. Some farmers in Japan have begun to use high-precision rea...

Information sharing is a powerful feature of multi-robot systems. Sharing information precisely and accurately is important and has many benefits. Particularly, smart information sharing can improve robot path planning. If a robot finds a new obstacle or blocked path, it can share this information with other remote robots allowing them to plan bett...

Motion analysis system has been used for making movies or TV games, improving sports skills and medical fields. The main types of motion analysis system are two methods with cameras and force plates or inertial sensors. Former is generally called “an optics type” and latter is “a wear type”. Considering analyzing a ski player on the snow ground, we...

In general, above knee prosthesis cannot generate extension torque at knee joint. It is difficult for wearer of above knee prosthesis to walk upstairs, in addition the burden on the other leg and waist is increased. On the other hand, above knee prosthesis that able to extend knee joint is expensive and heavy and need battery charge. We developed a...

Boom sprayers which spread agricultural chemicals to the wide area are used for the vast farmland. In addition to the fact that the scale of agriculture in Hokkaido is larger than other regions, hilly areas are often used. This causes vibrational excitations of the long booms of sprayer system, and boom vibrations invoke nonuniform distributions of...

This study analyzes the skill of world-class alpine ski-racer, for the skill improvement of Japanese alpine ski-racer. This research utilizes a 3D CAD model Matching Method to acquire analysis data of 3D motion by matching the skiracer’s 3D CAD model (based on Autodesk Inventor Professional 2016) to two-dimensional pictures which is extracted from...

Boom sprayers are commonly used for spraying agricultural chemicals and are necessary to realize large-scale agriculture such as Hokkaido region. Vibrations of the boom sprayer, which are in the large-scale flexible boom and the roll motion of the whole structure of the booms, prevent farmers from realizing the spraying operation with higher operat...

This study develops a pumpkin peeling robot with a compliance mechanism. The robot consists of three servo motors, which are a roll axis motor, a yaw axis motor and a motor for chucking and rotating a pumpkin. And a very simple compliance mechanism without using any force sensor is realized by a contact switch and a spring element between the peele...

Efficient task co-ordination is an important problem in multirobot systems. The explicit programming of each robot to perform specific tasks (e.g., cleaning) is too cumbersome and inefficient, as the areas to serve in a map may vary with time. Moreover, the number of available robots to serve may also vary, as some of the robots may be charging and...

Robot navigation is an indispensable component of any mobile service robot. Many path planning algorithms generate a path which has many sharp or angular turns. Such paths are not fit for mobile robot as it has to slow down at these sharp turns. These robots could be carrying delicate, dangerous, or precious items and executing these sharp turns ma...

Robot navigation is a complex process that involves real-time localization, obstacle avoidance, map update, control, and path planning. Thus, it is also a computationally expensive process, especially in multi-robot systems. This paper presents a cooperative multi-robot navigation scheme in which a robot can ‘hitchhike’ another robot, i.e., two rob...

Recently, motion analysis systems have been used in various fields such as medical field, entertainment, and sports. There are some types of motion analysis systems that use cameras and force plates, and use inertial sensors, etc., but the common problems are the experiments in the restricted environment and errors caused by muscular contraction. T...

Previous studies have shown that the pressure center of the foot bottom is minimized by adjusting the elevation angle of footbed in the ski boot to suitable angle for each alpine skier. And the fact makes the record time short. This study investigates the relationships between footbed angle – the position of the foremost of patella -maximum inner l...

People lose knee joint when above knee is severed because of disease or accident. Losing knee joint makes people difficult to walk and to go up/down. Therefore, the range of activities of prosthetic wearers are decreased and the quality of life (QOL) for these people is lost. The walking gait obtained by almost all existing above-knee joint prosthe...

This research supports is a sit ski player Nonno Nitta, who is from Sapporo City. And the purpose is her participate in 2018 Winter Paralympics. In order to develop a competitiveness-improvement sit ski for her, this study evaluate her perform when using sit ski with diferent settings. In the laboratory experiments we used a force plate to measure...

Japanese alpine ski racer has not won the medal in the Olympic Game for over half a century. This study aimed at building a novel ski technique that can improve the results of Japanese alpine ski racer. This paper focused on the angle formed by knee and ski board of ski racer in the turn motion, and clarified a turn technique to shorten the finish...

This study develops an Active Wheel Damper (AWD) which can be attached easily to flexible structures such as the boom sprayer. The AWD also achieves lightweight and higher inertia by using the flywheel, and can realize sky-hook control easily because the absolute angular velocity of the flexible structure is measured by the gyro sensor. For achievi...

An auto-steering system is a system that can directly control the steering wheels of a wheel-type vehicle without any directional manipulation by the drivers of the vehicle. This kind of technology is important for the automation of the off-road vehicles for agriculture. In this study, an auto-steering system was proposed by using a stepping motor...

This study develops a rotary-type active vibration control device (Active Wheel Damper, AWD) using a fly-wheel to control vibrations in flexible structures. The AWD achieves lightweight and higher inertia by the fly-wheel, and can be mounted on the flexible structure easily. In addition, the AWD can realize sky-hook controller easily because it can...

Line detection is an important problem in computer vision, graphics and autonomous robot navigation. Lines detected using a laser range sensor (LRS) mounted on a robot can be used as features to build a map of the environment, and later to localize the robot in the map, in a process known as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). We propose...

This study evaluates the vibration-isolation performances of the vibration-isolation table when the continuous increase / decrease method of the actuator number based on the proposed force re-distribution method is applied. This study deals with a vibration-isolation table supported by redundant number actuators to distribute the load on each actua...

This study develops a Active Wheel Damper Device (AWD) that can be attached easily to the boom sprayer. The AWD achieves lightweight and higher inertia by the flywheel and can be mounted on the flexible structure easily. In addition, this AWD can construct realize sky-hook control easily because of it can measure the absolute angular velocity of th...

This study investigates a design of a new foot bed for ski boots which can improves the angular velocities of lean motion of skier to decrease the time of alpine ski races for all of the alpine skiers. The subject is the five top level alpine-skier in Japan, and the experimets are carried out by using a ski simulator "Skytec". The foot pressure dis...

This study develops a rotary active vibration control device (AWD) using a flywheel to control vibrations in flexible structures. The AWD achieves lightweight and higher inertia by the flywheel and can be mounted on the flexible structure easily. In addition, the AWD can construct sky-hook control easily because it can measure the absolute angular...

Alpine ski racing is a competition in which the skier who skis down the course in the fastest time is the winner. Suitability of a ski boot design for the leg frame of a ski athlete is important to achieve a fast time and a win in a race. Performance of the ski boots acts as an interface between the physical performance of the skier and the perform...

The dynamic effects on the gait stability of a three-dimensional passive walker with respect to the radius of curvature of the spherical feet are studied by simulation. The radiuses of curvature of the spherical feet in the sagittal and frontal planes are designed to different, and the radius of curvature of the spherical feet in the sagittal plane...

Previous study developed an above-knee prosthesis with fix/extension mechanism of knee joint by using the floor reaction. The prosthesis has a lever on the bottom of foot, and caliper brake on the knee joint of prosthesis is active when the wire is pulled by push-in of the foot lever. The movement of the knee joint is fixed by champing force calipe...

Low back pain of caregiver has serious problem in welfare field. Transfer motion is thought as a cause of the low back pain, and it is necessary to reduce the lumbar burden. Also practical quantification method of lumbar burden is required strongly. This study aims to develop a practical and dynamic evaluation method of lumber burden by measuring s...

A general knee brace fixes a knee for achieving stability of the knee during the stance phase. However, the muscle, which should be used in normal condition, may not become to move by fixing the knee. Thus, effective rehabilitation can be prohibited. The practical active knee brace, which can generate active joint torque, has never appeared, becaus...

This report intends to apply the effectiveness of the passive walker to humanoid robots or welfare apparatuses such as the artificial legs or protheses in the future, and adds jointsto the knees of a quasi-passive walker. Further, we design the femoral part and the lower thigh of the robot with knee joints for the purpose to prevent from the knee b...

We have studied the ski boots design based on the characteristic of the frame of the Japanese player experimentally to shorten finish time for the purpose of the improvement of the competition results of the alpine skiing player. However, understanding and the practicing of the technique to use the potential of the tool are important as well as mod...

This study investigates method for an achieving scalability and long hour continuous operation for a vibration-isolation table supported with a redundant number of pneumatic actuators. In this study, a vibration-isolation table is supported by more than three actuators over the three degrees of freedom (DOF) of table's motion to decrease load per o...

In a sensor network, there are scenarios when the distance between the transmitting node and the receiving node is not fixed, but varies with time. Such scenarios can arise, for example, when both the transmitting node and receiving node are mounted on mobile robots. Such scenarios could also arise when the transmitting node is fixed (for example,...

For the purpose of developing a vibration-isolation table with flexibility and/or scalability (which means “with adaptability to desired load specification”), this study investigates a self-identification method with regard to positions or arrangement and effective pressure areas of pneumatic actuators which support a vibration-isolation table. The...

This paper develops a suppression method for an instable states arising in a redundant pneumatic actuators supporting a vibration-isolation table. The instable states are based on inadequate (ill-posed) distribution of forces on the redundant numbers of actuators with respect to the degrees of freedom of table's motion, and are named Competitive Pr...

A control method based on energy balance was proposed for gait stabilization of a quasi-passive walker. The mechanical energy is input into the walker by a mechanical oscillator for stable walking. The target trajectory of the mechanical oscillator is determined by online planning of its period, phase and amplitude. The period is determined by the...

This paper investigates the vortex-induced vibration of a circular cylinder supported by flexible cantilever beams under a uniform air flow. To improve the vortex-induced vibration model, the chaotic phenomena of the vortex are modeled as a random component of the fluid force. Next, the vibration properties of a cylinder supported by a pair of elas...

Map generation by a robot in a cluttered and noisy environment is an important problem in autonomous robot navigation. This paper presents algorithms and a framework to generate 2D line maps from laser range sensor data using clustering in spatial (Euclidean) and Hough domains in noisy environments. The contributions of the paper are: (1) it shows...