This work is concerned with the problem of robot localization using standard RFID tags as landmarks and an RFID reader as a landmark sensor. A main advantage of such an RFID-based localization system is the availability of landmark ID measurement, which trivially solves the data association problem. While the main drawback of an RFID system is its low spatial accuracy. The result in this paper is an improvement of the localization accuracy for a standard short-range RFID sensor. One of the main contributions is a proposal of a machine learning approach in which multiple classifiers are trained to distinguish RFID-signal features of each location. Another contribution is a design tool for tag arrangement by which the tag configuration needs not be manually designed by the user, but can be automatically recommended by the system. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated experimentally with a real mobile robot and an RFID system.

We describe an approach for modelling a person's face for model-based coding. The goal is to estimate the 3D shape by combining the contour analysis and shading analysis of the human face image in order to increase the quality of the estimated 3D shape. The motivation for combining contour and shading cues comes from the observation that the shading cue leads to severe errors near the occluding boundary, while the occluding contour cue provides incomplete surface information in regions away from contours. Towards this, we use the deformable model as the common level of integration such that a higher-quality measurement will dominate the depth estimate. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated using a real facial image.

A micro reactor array for biochemical or biomedical use was developed. Conceptof this development is to get as much as biological data at the same time. Ninety-six micro reaction wells, volume of each well was 1.5 µl, were integrated in the array. The micro reactor array was fabricated on 1 mm thick silicon wafer and twelve pairs of a temperature sensor and a heater were formed on the backside. A tiny transparent window for optical measurement was formed at the center of bottom wall on each well. Several temperature gradients were applied to the array by means of few heaters and compared with simulation results to optimize the parameters. Finally, performance of the array was evaluated by basic DNA reaction. Advantages of the array system are the fast thermal response due to the small heat capacity and easy to make several reaction conditions in parallel.