A Female Researcher Working on a Female-like Humanoid HRP-4C

摘要

Proportion of women in engineering in Japan is only 13 percent [1]. In the field of robotics, especially humanoid robots, the proportion seems to be much less. This paper describes the author's current activity as an example of woman in robotics. I am not only a minority as a female robotics researcher. My career of research on humanoids is not long. After obtaining two Ph.D.s, I have worked in research laboratories in a university, a private company, and an independent administrative institute (I sometimes introduce myself as a solo industry-academic government experienced worker"). And each place, I had been in charge of different research topics; visual serving, human motion analysis, impression analysis, bilateral teleportation control, mixed reality system, and bipedal locomotion of humanoid robots. In Japan, many famous researchers on bipedal locomotion of humanoid robots tend to enter this field in their period of graduate schools, and thus I am a minority among them. Nevertheless I manage to be accepted as a researcher on this field. I still hardly dare to say I am someone, but try to write what makes a minority so successful through the introduction of my work on HRP-4C.