Robotics for Health, Well-being, Safe and Resilient Societies

Project abstract:

Robotics is an interdisciplinary research area that involves mechanics, electronics, computer science, biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence and even more. It is a key technology for health, well-being, safe and resilient society, by expanding our ability and changing our lifestyle. The development of the intuitive and efficient human-machine interfaces has enabled a variety of applications. One is the robots that snuggle up with humans to provide assistance for handicapped persons and care for the elderly generation. Advancement of robotics combined with biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence and neuroscience improves the quality of life. Another application is remotely-operated robots for hazardous operations at locations that are difficult and/or dangerous to access such as mining, construction, contaminated sites, disaster response, and space exploration. The capability to present a sense of realism and execute appropriate actions beyond distance and time develops a new teleoperation ability. An extreme application in this direction is outer space exploration that will expand the boundary of our scientific knowledge and our habitable zones in the future. The recent rapid progress of AI and machine learning technologies bring synergies to robotics to create higher-level of motion intelligence in these applications. Today, we are facing difficult challenges of natural disasters and emerging deceases. In particular, COVID-19 imposes a new normal lifestyle to prevent the infection to the virus by keeping enough distances. The robotics that enables substantial snuggling-up interaction at large physical distance will also contribute in such situations. In the project, we plan to have an online workshop and an in-person workshop every year to facilitate the discussions among the participating researchers from the six HeKKSaGOn Universities, to promote substantial collaborations using possible GermanyJapan funding schemes and to accelerate the exchange of young researchers such as PhD students and Postdoc fellows.

Lead coordinator:

Name: Kazuya Yoshida
Position: Professor
Institution: Tohoku University
Department, Faculty: Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Aerospace
Engineering

Other coordinator(s):

Name: Tamim Asfour
Position: Professor
Institution: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Department, Faculty: Department of Informatics, Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics