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Tatsuya Kittaka, Department of Precision Engineering, wins a JSME Fellow Award for Outstanding Young Engineers

 

 On 9Th June 2016, Dr. Tatsuya Kittaka, Department of Precision Engineering, wins a JSME (Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers) Fellow Award for Outstanding Young Engineers.The award is provided to those who gave a great lecture at a lecture meeting held by JSME.

 

 

<About awarded research>
 Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for remote control robots, which are used in disaster sites and so on. Remote operation is usually conducted while watching images acquired from cameras mounted on the robot. However, it has been an important problem that operational efficiency decreases because of limited field of view. For example, target work objects may be occluded by obstacles. So far multiple cameras are mounted on the robot to expand the field of view, but using multiple images requires highly skilled technique and the ability to concentrate.
 In this research, we proposed a system which enables to see through occluded areas in order to help operators confirm working environment. In the proposed system, three-dimensional information acquired from cameras mounted in front of the robot and on the arm of the robot is used. By moving the arm and getting information of the opposite side of obstacles, it is possible to present see-through images in real time. In addition, the proposed system enables to see the environment from arbitrary viewpoint using the three-dimensional information. Experiments on an actual machine verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

 

<Comments>
 Thanks to my supervisors and seniors at my laboratory, I was able to make a worthwhile presentation. It is our greatest pleasure to see that our research results appreciated like this. I am going to keep on studying image processing and to improve the quality of see-through images.