Improvement of Violinist Robot using a Passive Damper Device

The aim of this study was to determine how the violinist robot could produce a good quality of violin sounds. We began our study with the basic physics of producing sound with a violin. We found three parameters that influenced the quality of the sound produced by the violin; the bowing force, the bowing velocity and the sounding point. In particular, the bowing force was found to be the most important parameter in producing good sounds. Furthermore, to produce such sounds, a same amount of the bowing force must be applied on the contact point between a bow and a string. However, it is hard to keep a same amount of the bowing force on the contact point due to inherent characteristics of a bow. Thus, we primarily focused on the bowing force by considering bowing a string as a spring-mass system. Then, we devised a passive damper device to offset variables in the spring-mass system that may result in changing the bowing force on the contact point. We then validated our methodology with the violinist robot, a human-like torso robot. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Design and Implementation of User Friendly Remote Controllers for Rescue Robots in Fire Sites

Robot applications with rescue operations have been widely developed for disaster prevention purposes such as fire-fighting robot, rescue robot, and surveillance robot. This paper proposes two novel wireless remote controllers which offer not only user friendly operating interface but also easy robot controls. The handheld type controller is able to be easily carried by fire fighters and the joystick based controller enables more accurate and rapid controls for specified tasks in emergence environment. Both controllers are designed to be capable of gathering environment information such as video data, temperature, gas concentration and etc. Through the performance evaluation and questionnaire survey with a mobile rescue robot system, we have analyzed their efficiency considering fire fighter's usability. Then by accepting the opinions of fire fighters, we suggest applicable scenarios for both controllers in expected fire sites. © 2010 SICE.1