In order to revitalize the rcommunities, many municipalities with declining populations are making efforts to utilize the “history” and “culture” of the region for community development and tourism. However, first of all, it is necessary to academically clarify what are the characteristics of history and culture of the region, and to think of effective ways to use them. The center conducts measurement surveys of historical buildings and townscapes to study the value of cultural assets and methods of utilization, and reports and makes proposals to prefectures and municipalities. We are also promoting research on the utilization of cultural assets at an academic level with the aim of contributing to the local communities, we are training and educating human resources with the ability of “cultural thinking ability” which means to see and think about things from a new point of view with understanding of coexistance and interdependency included in the concept of culture based on the understanding of what is culture. Overseas, we are transferring this technology and training engineers in the Philippines, Bhutan, Fiji, etc., making use of our original restoration method based on surveys of traces.

We are developing soft actuators and soft sensors with flexibility and safety in life support devices and human frendly robot that act directly on humans. In addition, we are developing a pipe inspection robot that has a flexible structure by itself using a pneumatic actuator that can run on its own in complicated pipe and can be used in a wet narrow space. Then, in order to reduce the weight and labor of the peripheral equipment for driving the robot, we have devised a control valve with excellent cost performance and a new propulsion mechanism of the robot, and are considering making the inspection robot compact. Furthermore, we are developing local structure control technology by using burnishing as research on processing technology.

1. About the ions constituting of the artificial breeding water, the influence of those components and concentration on the aquatic organisms is under study. Also, we investigate about the physiological effect caused by feeding a long time period and are developing “more suitable environment water”.
2. In the initial breeding of some types, so many aquatic organisms would die than in the mid-term breeding. This case would happen because of the unsuitable environment around the larvae and the low tolerance to the change. So we have been solving these problems and demonstrating the environment for the initial breeding of the larvae.
3. In the long term breeding of R.A.S., some materials derived from the feed to the breeding water will often accumulate. So we study the efficient methods of draining these materials out of the system.

With the spread of Mobile Mapping System (a vehicle equipped with GNSS, laser scanners and cameras), huge point clouds are being accumulated rapidly. My study is to make effective use of this data in current road-related measurement system. And also I’m trying to display this as a high-speed 3DCG via the Internet.

Metaheuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing, iterated local search, genetic evolutionary algorithms are known to be effective optimization methods that can be used for various problems in engineering field. Our research interests are developments, improvements and analyses of high-performance evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristic algorithms based on local search for optimization problems such as Maximum Clique Problem, Graph Coloring Problem, Quadratic Assignment Problem, Facility Location Problem, Vehicle Routing Problem, Scheduling Problems, etc.

Electronic devices, for example LSI, and so on, are constructed of microscopic electronic circuits formed on semiconductor surfaces. Recently, nano-technology makes the sclae of the components of the microscopic electronic circuits nano-meter scale and makes the devices small, low-cost, and high-performance. We performe the theoretical study of the solid surfaces which handles fundamental properties of the nano-devices. Particularly, we forcus the syufy of the nano-scale structure as molecular gears or atomic chains on solid surfaces with the first principles calculations.

The application of superconductors makes it possible to develop superconducting motors with an unprecedentedly large power-to-gravity ratio. In our laboratory, we are developing superconducting motors with high energy density, such as jet engines, exceeding 10 kW/kg power-to-weight ratio by applying thin-film high-temperature superconducting wires to superconducting armatures.

Multifarious systems are devoloped for induction motor or interior permanent magnetic synchronous motor drives. The systems are implemented by a microcomputer which has 32bit floating point units and multi-function timer units. The methods for estimating the motor speed or weaken flux current have been proposed.

I am currently conducting researches on pedestrian flow modeling, simulation, and optimization. There are two reasons for investigating pedestrian flow. One is to solve the day-to-day problems of crowded public spaces, such as stations, shopping malls, pavements and many other places. The other is to optimize evacuation procedures from densely buildings and urban centers in case of an unpredicted event.

High temperature superconducting (HTS) wires have good characteristics such as perfect electric conductivity and large critical current density. Therefore the HTS wires are expected to contribute to development of small, lightweight and very efficient electric power apparatus. I am currently conducting researches on development of a small power source with an HTS transformer for supplying large current, a protection system for normal transitions in superconducting coils and a superconducting rotating gantry for heavy ion therapy.

The efficiency and performance of many industrial control systems depend on embedded servocontrollers. However, the presence of non-linear, time-varying unmeasurable disturbanses often lead to inability of the system to achieve low values of steady state error and may limit the closed loop bandwidth. Hence, the disturbance rejection is one of the most important and applicable design problem. I work in design and analysis of intelligent control systems including online identification of unknown system model parameters and rejection of unmeasurable disturbances. Another major research topic is development of intelligent UAV (drones) robots and their application in autonomous inspection of electrical energy transmission facilities, buildings etc..

Real-world oriented interface is a research field that aims to realize computers supporting our work in the real world. In our laboratory, we are working on the realization of real-world oriented interfaces.

Although computer performance continues to improve, a very long time is required to solve complex calculations such as deep learning, big data processing, and physics simulation. Therefore, we are researching to improve the computing performance of such complex and large-scale problems by parallel processing using GPUs and many-core CPUs.
Moreover, we are developing reconfigurable computing systems based on FPGA technologies and finding efficient computing algorithms with hardware/software co-processing.

This picture shows an example of research concept. I try to stabilize current-controlled DC/DC converter using periodic threshold. Circuit theory, experiment, MPPT control algorithms are already constructed. I’m currently applying for a patent on MPPT control algorithms. Now, I’m at the stage of industrial application.

Ashworth scales have been used as a method to evaluate the muscle tonus of the patient having spasticity.This method however cannot evaluate it without the enforcer’s subjective judgment.Therefore we analyze the motion of leg by measuring pendulum motion (Pendulum Test) to evaluate the spasticity objectively.

The picture shows two one axis accelerometer were attached to a leg to measure leg motion.Because the angle output of the leg is only provided by the motion capture directly, 2 times differential calculus operation is necessary to obtain the angular acceleration output convenient to evaluate.In contrast, the angular acceleration output is provided directly with our method.

I make a study on reliable, efficient and secure information transfer. In recent years, such as digital communication and digital recording device, it is increasingly digitized in a variety of systems. For improving the reliability of the digital system, error control coding technique is used. These areas of research is the field called coding theory. Error control coding techniques have been actually used in such as mobile phones, DVD, QR code, digital TV broadcasting. Decoding methods suitable for hardware implementation for low density parity check codes, and efficient coding methods for digital storage device such as flash memory are studied. we evaluate the performance by computer simulation.

In recent years, almost all digital systems have operated in synchronization with the clock pulse. However, high-frequency clock pulses not only increase the power consumption but also cause instability in the system. In our laboratory, we are working on the applications of an asynchronous circuit without clock pulses, for example, improving the performance of large-scale digital systems and reducing the power consumption of biometric signal processors. The proposed architectures are designed and implemented in the reconfigurable programmable gate array (FPGA), and we are also working on the FPGA-based image processing accelerator for surveillance camera systems and medical diagnostic imaging systems.

We propose a high-performance computer system called a Hybrid-Cluster and are conducting applied research. It provides a common framework for easy cooperation between computers and consumer electronic devices, such as controlling consumer electronic devices from computers and vice versa. In addition, in the field of educational technology, we are working on practical education, such as efforts to increase students’ self-study time and team development of software in lectures.

Visible light communication (VLC) is a novel optical wireless communication technique that uses blinking of visible light. This technique can not only provide light but also broadcast data. In this study, we develop a VLC system using an LED traffic light and brake lamp (transmitter) and an in-vehicle high-speed image sensor (receiver) for an intelligent transport system (ITS). We refer to this VLC system as image-sensor-based VLC. This system contributes to exchange a safety information between roadway infrastructure (or vehicle) and vehicles.

　I do research the image processing using color effects and visual characteristics. For example, the human visual features vary with on age. I advance the development of a lightness transform method considering the visual features of the elderly person.