PLENARY LECTURE

TITLE: A New trend of Current Robotics Technology and the Possibility of New Robotics Business

By Dr. Kazuo Tanie

ABSTRACT: At the beginning of new millennium, our society has several big problems to be solved to maintain good quality of our life. Those are relating to saving natural resources, increase of aged population in the society, preservation of global environment and so on. It is supposed that robotics and intelligent system technologies can be a powerful way and play a more important role to solve the problems our future society will have. Actually, there are strong expectations to robotics and intelligent system technologies in our society. With those social situation in mind, the common interests in robotics seems to be moving from industrial to non-industrial applications. The typical examples which support this thought is increase of the research activities on human friendly robotics. Several important technical advancements have been made in the topics of Humanoid, communication robots, health care robots, medical robots and so on in the past ten years. Especially, there was remarkable advancements of humanoid technology in recent years.

In this talk, current robotic technological advancements will be reviewed, especially focusing on humanoid and human friendly robotics. Also, in order to establish new robotic business in the area of human friendly applications, how we should prepare for the technology will be discussed.