Professor Daisuke Chugo, Faculty of Engineering, received the Local Organising Committee Award, Environmental Robotics Application for Sustainability, 1st Prize, at the awards ceremony of the 25th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies (CLAWAR2022) held on 13 September 2022, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal. This prize, newly established this year, is awarded for technology that contributes to the sustainability of society and for technological presentations that contribute to the post-Corona era. The paper by Prof. Chugo and his colleagues was selected as the best paper out of 60 papers published in the Proceedings of this international conference.
The title of Professor Chugo's winning paper is Human models simulating the physical conditions of the elderly individual and standing assistance method based on these models]. This paper proposes a method for having a robot design standing assistance movements that are perfectly suited to the elderly person by estimating the degree of weakness of the elderly person by measuring how much force they can exert in six or more simple movements, instead of conventionally measuring the degree of weakness of the body using various biometric sensors. The method is groundbreaking in that it enables estimation of physical fitness without robot technicians meeting directly with elderly people who are at high risk due to the coronal vortex. The co-authors of this paper are Yuya Miyazaki (first-year master's student at Kwansei Gakuin University), Associate Professor Satoshi Muramatsu (Tokai University), Professor Sho Yokota (Toyo University), Professor Jin-Hua She (Tokyo University of Technology) and Professor Hiroshi Hashimoto (Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology). This research was funded by Individual Special Research Subsidy from Kwansei Gakuin University and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (20H04566).