Open Class in Robotics

This presentation introduces an application of Wide Angle Fovea sensor and Gaze rate.

We have been doing on development of Wide Angle Fovea (WAF) sensor by producing a special-made wide-angle lens since 31 years ago. WAF sensor was originally inspired from human vision mechanism, i.e., we achieve very wide field of view and high spatial resolution locally in the attention region in input images simultaneously.

First, we introduce development history of WAF sensor until now. Second, we introduce Liquid Crystal Fovea (LCF) sensor, which has been developed to solve issues of the original WAF sensor. LCF sensor is a non-mechanical WAF sensor which can change the high resolution attention region without any mechanical part. We can achieve downsizing and saving electric power consumption largely.

Third, we introduce “gaze rate”, that is a statistical quantified probability distribution over work space calculated using gaze point data measured from many participants when they are doing some operation. We aim at improving safety and efficiency of human-robot collaborative works by sharing this gaze rate information with robot systems which coexist in the same work space. On the same time, we intend to enable humans to predict next task of motions of the collaborative robot from explicit camera work of equipped WAF sensor. Lastly, as a concrete exapmle we introduce our ongoing project of applying LCF sensor as an endoscope camera for a remote sputum suction device.

Sota Shimizu received his Ph.D. in Electronic–Mechanical Engineering from Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, in 1998.

He has held research and teaching positions at several institutions, including the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA (since 2003); Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan (since 2008); the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan (since 2012); Keio University, Yokohama, Japan (since 2015); and the Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan (since 2017).

He is currently a Professor in the Department of Media Informatics at Aichi University of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include robotics, bio-inspired vision sensors, cognitive science, and human-assistive robotic systems, with a particular focus on mutual attention and interaction between humans and robots.