Open Class: Human-Robot Communication w\ Sota Shimizu

This presentation introduces 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 the Ph.D. degree in electronic–mechanical engineering from Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, in 1998.
Since 2003, he has been with California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA.  
Since 2008, he has been with Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.  
Since 2012, he has been with University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.  
Since 2015, he has been with Keio University, Yokohama, Japan.  
Since 2017, he has been with Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.  
Currently, he is a professor with Department of Media Informatics, Aichi University of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.  
His current research interests include robotics, bio-inspired vision sensor , cognitive science , human assistive robot and system by paying attention to each other between human and robot.