Nobuaki Fujiki’s research while affiliated with Kanazawa Institute of Technology and other places

The purpose of this research is to propose a control method for assistive devices for upper limbs. The disturbance estimation property of the internal model control is applied to detect motion intention of users. The experimental prototype of the assistive device for upper limbs is developed to evaluate the proposed control method. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments. The proposed device is expected to maintain residual function of upper limbs.

In this paper, we propose the control method of a writing robot for reproducing brush pressure and trajectory without force sensors. The main goal of this research is to estimate and save the brush pressure by using the internal model control. In order to evaluate the proposed controllers, the experimental device is developed. The paper shows that the proposed controller is able to reproduce the brush pressure on flat and inclined surface through experiments.

A new controller scheme based on the IMC design structure is proposed in this paper. Due to using an inverse system or an approximate inverse system for the IMC structure, the order of the controller leads the high order, meanwhile the high order controller is not practical in implementation. This paper is concerned with the problem of reducing a high order controller to a reduced order one. The disturbance estimation property of the closed loop system is also discussed. The proposed controller scheme is applied to a prototype robotic hand that can hold an object with suitable grasping force without force sensor. The effectiveness of the proposed controller scheme is confirmed by experiments.

In this paper, an extended internal model control (IMC) scheme for a sensorless force control on an uneven surface is proposed to such kind of surface-polishing, deburring and rubbing machines. The IMC controller scheme has disturbance decoupling property, good tracking performance and disturbance estimation property. In order to extend the conventional IMC scheme to force control on uneven surfaces, we propose a novel control scheme based on the IMC scheme, and discuss stability of the closed-loop system. Moreover, effectiveness of the proposed IMC scheme is confirmed by comparative experiments.

In this paper, we propose a control system for a prototype robotic hand that can hold an object with suitable grasping force without using a force sensor. This control system is composed of two 1-DOF robot hands and a CCD camera. The control system recognizes the object with the CCD camera, and the database retrieves the suitable grasping force for holding each object. We propose the control method of a reduced order observer-based stabilizing controller by using limiting properties of LQR for this control system. The proposed reduced order observer-based stabilizing controller has disturbance estimation property and disturbance decoupling property which is the same as the internal model control design structure. We apply the proposed method to the robot hand, and confirm effectiveness of the method by comparative experiments.

In the engineering design III (ED III) course at Kanazawa Institute of Technology, the department of mechanical and mechanical systems engineering has tried to introduce the engineering design process in place of the conventional graduation study course. One of authors has presented several advantages of educational effects on the engineering design process. Now, it is necessary to improve the effects from the viewpoints of both students and teachers. This paper presents the results of questionnaires and interviews from both teachers and senior students at the department. Moreover we present the educational results under various kinds of viewpoints for introducing the method of the engineering design process into ED III.