Invited Speech
 Thursday August 21,
Prof. Fumitoshi Matsuno (UEC, Japan)
"Rescue Robot Systems - From Snake-like Robots to Human Interface -"

Prof. Hirose Abstract.
Intelligent rescue systems with information and communications technologies (ICT) and robotics technology (RT) have been proposed to mitigate disaster damages, especially in Japan after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. In particular, it is has been stressed the importance of developing robots for search and rescue tasks, which can actually work in a real disaster site. In 2002 the "Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Urban Areas" (5 years project) was launched by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. It aims at significant mitigation of the earthquake disaster damage on the scale of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, in big city regions such as Tokyo metropolitan area and Keihanshin area. In USA the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, DC, the hijacked plane crash in Pennsylvania, and the Anthrax attack that immediately followed instantly changed people attitude about safety and security in their personal lives. Public safety and security problems are not limited to the United States, since every country has experienced man-made and natural disasters in the past. Solutions will depend upon new, unconventional approaches to search and rescue. Robotics, automation, intelligent machines, systems and devices can play an important role in providing technology that can contribute to Safety, Security and Rescue activities.

In this talk, I would like to introduce the development of rescue robot systemsand the information systems for the disaster response in the "Japanese Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Urban Areas" and our laboratory. I will introduce rescue robots (snake-like robots, a wheel type robot, a legged robot, and a crawler type robot ) for the information correction and a teleportation human interface that have been developed in our laboratory.

Biography.
Fumitoshi Matsuno was born in Nagoya, Japan on 26 July 1957. Dr. Matsuno received the PhD (Dr. Eng.) degree from Osaka University in 1986. In 1986 he joined the Department of Control Engineering, Osaka University. He became a Lecturer in 1991 and an Associate Professor in 1992, in the Department of Systems Engineering, Kobe University. In 1996 he joined the Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor. Since 2003, he has been a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Intelligent Systems, University of Electro-Communications. He holds also a post of the director of NPO International Rescue System Institute (IRS). From 2005 he is a Vice-President of IRS. IRS is the industry-government-academia-civilian research organization to advance and diffuse high-technologies coping with disaster. IRS aims to contribute to build a safe society in which people can live without anxiety by cooperation of various organizations and human resources.

His current research interests lie in robotics, control of distributed parameter system and nonlinear system, rescue support system in fire and disaster, and geographic information system. He has published 86 journal papers, 145 international conference paper which passed peer reviews, 39 survey articles and 9 books.

He received the Research Promotion Prize and the Outstanding Paper Award from the Institute of Systems, Control, and Information Engineers of Japan in 1986 and 1993 respectively. He also received the Research Promotion Prize from the Robotic Society of Japan in 1989, the Outstanding Paper Award from the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, the Ministry of Home Affairs of Japan in 1997, and the Outstanding Paper Award in 2001 and 2006, Takeda Memorial Prize in 2001 from the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, among other awards.

He is a member of the IEEE, the JSME, the RSJ, the ISCIE, the SICE, and the GISA, among other organizations. He served a director of SICE (The Society of Instrument and Control Engineers) and RSJ (Robotic Society of Japan). He served as a local arrangement chair of 1999 IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC99), a program co-chair of 2004 IEEE Int. Workshop on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR04), an invited sessions co-chair of 2004 IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Biomimetics (RoBio04), a program chair of SSRR05, a program vice chair of IEEE Conf. on Control Applications (CCA2007), and so on. He is also a co-chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics, a chair of Steering Committee of SICE Annual Conference, an associate editor of International Journal of Advanced Robotics, International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems, and Conf. Editorial Board of IEEE CSS.