EU Good Practice Award

Hasegawa Laboratory for intelligent Robots and Vision Systems, Fukuoka

Website - http://fortune.is.kyushu-u.ac.jp/

The Hasegawa Laboratory is researching about intelligent robots working in the real world and strives to realize a new community in which people and robots work together. To realize this community, we have incorporated different points of view like RT (Robot Technology) and ICT (Information and Communication Technology), human psychology and morality, including the reconstruction of a town's infrastructure.

The main research topics in our laboratory are a robotics system for collecting various kinds of information in daily environment, such as an office and a town, and a computer vision system for robots coexisting with human. Since the daily environment is complex and unpredictable, robots need a variety of information in advance to coexist with human safely. However, it is difficult for human to expect all necessary information and prepare it for robots. It would be convenient if robots could obtain (learn) all necessary information, but robots would need long time and various kinds of experiences. Moreover, complicated learning systems and tons of memories are necessary. So in our laboratory, we focus on an environment where robots coexist with human, and we have been working on following researches; (i) the environment itself obtains all necessary information for robots, (ii) the information is embedded to the environment, (iii) robots get it whenever needed. Urban robotics is a research field situated between smart/sensible city research and robotics research. It’s goal is to develop cutting-edge technologies as well as application scenarios for urban life, supported by robotic devices. The research field is pioneered by T. Hasegawa and his Town Management System enabling robots to outsource complexity to sensors and vision systems distributed in the city/urban environment. The Hasegawa lab thus will advise Researchers interested performance enhanced urban environments (combining/extending urban planning with new functionalities through ubiquitous technologies).

Kyushu University and especially the Laboratory for intelligent Robots and Vision Systems host associate professors, students, researchers and post-docs from all around the world. As Japan is a technologically leading nation in terms of robotics and intelligent systems, the lab advises industry and other institutions worldwide. Additionally, several researchers at the Laboratory are financed by JSPS which shows its excellence. Further, the Laboratory has a strong relation to national Industry and National Research Institutes as for instance MITI and the Electro-technical Laboratory of the Japanese Government. Two large scale Research Projects involving a multitude of researchers, industry and national research institutes stand out:

 

  1. ROBOT TOWN (a real world experimental house has been built up – the house follows a open source approach and is open for researchers around the world to perform experiments)

Platform House

 

  1. MEDICAL IMAGE PROCESSING

Development of Simulation for Soft Tissue Deformation based on Real-Time Finite Element Method (FEM)

Further information indicating the laboratory’s size and activity can be found here: http://fortune.ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp/about-e.html

Hasegawa Laboratory: Laboratory for intelligent Robots and Vision Systems, Department of Intelligent Systems, Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, local contact; Prof. HASEGAWA Tsutomu, hasegawa@irvs.is.kyushu-u.ac.jp

» Back to Associated partners