There has recently been considerable interest in research on wearable non-grounded force display. However, there have been no developments for the communication of nonverbal information (ex. tennis and golf swing). We propose a small and lightweight wearable force display to present motion timing and direction. The display outputs a torque using rotational moment and mechanical brakes. We explain the principle of this device, and describe an actual measurement of the torque and torque sensitivity experiments.

Out-of-order superscalar processors have high performance but consume a large amount of energy for dynamic instruction scheduling. We propose a front-end execution architecture (FXA) for improving the energy efficiency of out-of-order superscalar processors. FXA has two execution units: an out-of-order execution unit (OXU) and an in-order execution unit (IXU). The OXU is the execution core of a common out-of-order superscalar processor. In contrast, the IXU consists only of functional units and a bypass network only. The IXU is placed at the processor front end and executes instructions in order. The IXU functions as a filter for the OXU. Fetched instructions are first fed to the IXU, and the instructions are executed in order if they are ready to execute. The instructions executed in the IXU are removed from the instruction pipeline and are not executed in the OXU. The IXU does not include dynamic scheduling logic, and thus its energy consumption is low. Evaluation results show that FXA can execute more than 50% of the instructions by using IXU, thereby making it possible to shrink the energy-consuming OXU without incurring performance degradation. As a result, FXA achieves both high performance and low energy consumption. We evaluated FXA and compared it with conventional out-of-order/in-order superscalar processors after ARM big.LITTLE architecture. The results show that FXA achieves performance improvements of 7.4% on geometric mean in SPECCPU INT 2006 benchmark suite relative to a conventional superscalar processor (big), while reducing the energy consumption by 17% in the entire processor. The performance/energy ratio (the inverse of the energy-delay product) of FXA is 25% higher than that of a conventional superscalar processor (big) and 27% higher than that of a conventional in-order superscalar processor (LITTLE).

To provide a satellite communication system with high reliability for social infrastructure, building flexible beam adapting to change of communication traffic is necessary. Optical Beam Forming Network has the capability of broadband transmission and small light construction. However, in space environment, there are concerns that the reception efficiency is reduced by the relative phase error of receiving signal among antenna elements with temperature fluctuation. To prevent this, we control relative phase among received signals with optical phase locked loop. In this paper, we propose the active optical phased array system using multi dither heterodyning technique for receiving OBF, and present experimental results under temperature fluctuation. We evaluated the stability of relative phase among 3 elements for temperature fluctuation at multiplexer from -15 to 45, and checked the stability of PLL among 3 elements.

In this paper, we demonstrate that a formal approach is effective for improving reliability of cooperative robot designs, where the control logics are expressed in concurrent FSMs (Finite State Machines), especially in accordance with the standard FSM4RTC (FSM for Robotic Technology Components), by a case study of cooperative transport robots. In the case study, FSMs are modeled in the formal specification language CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) and checked by the model-checking tool FDR, where we show techniques for modeling and verification of cooperative robots implemented with the help of the RTM (Robotic Technology Middleware).