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.