Drawing the future of “using robots” through university knowledge

Professor Masayuki Inaba
(Department of Creative Informatics)

The lifework of Professor Inaba is to realize, through university “knowledge”, a future society and a home in which humans and robots live together. The main focus is humanoid robots. First, humanoid behaviors are assessed and the derived technology is fed back to make it more advanced as core technology. It is then applied to a highly reliable mechanism and to new robot research in order to meet new needs of society and home. He devotes efforts to pave the way for the development of robots that perform tasks, by integrating them as systems.

Professor Inaba proposed an unprecedented flexible-spine musculoskeletal humanoid that moves as smoothly as a human and a life-size humanoid that supports day-to-day life of human, and also presented a unique home robot that cleans a room, washes clothes and dishes on its own. “Eyes” and “hands” technologies developed as part of humanoid technologies were applied to enable motions such as grabbing and moving bowls and dishes to a dishwasher, and sliding and bringing back a chair to the original position after cleaning under the table. His approach is building technology to be used by industry from technology discovered by university, and then putting it back into the university core technology to make it as a core technology for next robot research.

Robotics was “development-driven” research until around 2000. However, it shifted to “application-driven” research by combining the knowledge and the know-how of university with ideas of industry. We have entered into the age in which information technology and robotics technology are converged to “create” seeds for the next industry ---- this is the robot roadmap envisioned by Professor Inaba who has a 30 years history of robot research. He strives to realize the future society for symbiosis between humans and robots according to the roadmap.