2025 Winter Robotics Colloquium: Fumihide Tanaka (University of Tsukuba)

In this talk

1. 10:17

   Tsukuba’s robotics research

   Tanaka introduces the University of Tsukuba and highlights collaborations across robotics, sports science, and the arts. He surveys projects including Cyberdyne’s commercialized exoskeletons, teleoperated manipulation, underwater drones, facility-inspection robots, and flexible, underactuated systems.

2. 22:54

   Robots as peers for young children

   At UC San Diego, Tanaka spent three years observing children under 24 months interacting with Sony’s QRIO robot. Over roughly six months of interaction, researchers found that children increasingly treated QRIO like another child. When the robot powered down, one boy covered it with a blanket, a caregiving gesture his parents said they had not taught him.

3. 36:38

   Learning by teaching a robot

   Tanaka describes a “care-receiving” approach in which children teach robots, instead of receiving lessons from them. A SoftBank Pepper vocabulary app applied the idea: children taught Pepper color words, while a remote human teacher supplied correct answers. Tanaka says controlled studies at an English school found the approach effective.

4. 45:25

   Social robots for older adults

   Tanaka’s recent work explores robots that connect older adults with family and make it easier to share sensitive concerns. A survey of 720 older adults in Japan informed guidelines for matching a robot’s conversational personality to a person and topic. He also presents a phone-like device that uses internal moving weights to add nonverbal signals to text messages.

5. 58:42

   Soft robots for comfort and pain relief

   Tanaka describes robots with adjustable surface temperature and softness as possible ways to address loneliness and improve interaction. In one study with more than 80 participants, an airbag-based wearable robot that squeezes back reduced subjective pain ratings during simulated thermal pain. The proposed use includes helping children cope with vaccination pain and fear.