In the intelligent robot laboratory at the University of Tsukuba, the aim of our research is to develop new technologies for the autonomous and automatic machines (robots) that will support our daily life in real environment. Nowadays, thanks to the progress in science and technology, many machines with high power, high speed and high precision are available.
These convenient and useful machines are successively developed, and some of them are automatically controlled by computers. However, most of them have good performance only in environments that have been designed for them. By comparison, humans and animals are able to achieve various tasks in much more complicated environments. The objective of our research is to endow autonomous machines with the same capabilities, that is to say, to realize useful and reliable autonomous robot by endowing them with flexibility, adaptability, robustness and reliability in order to fulfill accurately a given task in any environment. Since hardware and software of computer technology or the so-called IT is rapidly improving now, computer serves the part of most jobs about communication, processing and storage of information. We would like to use this "usefulness" not only in computer worlds but also in the real world.
We can say that this is our research objective. As an example to the above purpose, we are developing a mobile robot to reach the given goal location and work on the requested task in outdoor field or in indoor building environment. Our main research topic is to discover the technologies for realizing such kind of robots.