Handling of micro-objects about 0.1 mm square is essential in the fields of biotechnology and micromachine production. These operations have some difficulty because it requires unnatural hand manipulations under the microscopic images. So the productivity of those operations is not high. To solve these problems, a 3-D software camera system has been introduced. The system consists of two subsystems: the 3-D entire shape model with texture extraction system; and the stereo image generation system. The method of the 3-D model extraction system using multidirectional camera is introduced, then the attempt to generate the stereo image from the 3-D model is described.
Functions for the visual inspection functions of color defects such as color spots or color stains are required for pattern inspection machines for printed materials. Problems in developing inspection systems for these defects, and color inspection characteristics of the inspection machines are hard to standardize. The authors introduce a calibration method to adjust all aspects of the color evaluation features of the pattern inspection machine to the standard color measurement instrument. Also, the inspection machine adopts human sensitivity to evaluate the color differences which depend on the colors under inspection.
Nano-level 3-D measurement is one of the key technologies for the current and future generation of production systems for semi-conductors, LCDs and nano-devices. To meet with these applications, wide range nano-level 3-D shape measurement method using combination of RGB laser lights has been developed. It measures the height of nano-objects from the combination of RGB LED lights interference. To analyze the combination of RGB lights, the color analysis method on xy-color plane has been introduced. In this method, the color changes on xy-color plane means the height changes. Experimental system to measure the three micro-meter height has been developed, and succeeded to measure the 50 nm step and 1000 nm step samples. The method has been applied to measure a nano-device, a contact needle for measurement. The shape of the needle has been extracted, successfully.
In the fully customer-oriented design system, design candidates should be evaluated if they reflect appropriately the ambiguous preferences and demands intended by customers and designers or not. The researches in the total human-oriented design system have come up with prototype systems that have functions capable not only of providing an environment for products, but for displaying and evaluating products as well. There are many researches in this field. Here, the technologies to extract the personal room environment models and to control the display system by users' gesture have been introduced.
To improve the productivity of very large scale of LSIs or large LCD panels, not only the technologies to inspect the LSIs or the LCDs but to repair them are required. To remove the less than one-micrometer contaminants on the LSIs, it is required to extract their 3-D shape, precisely. To meet with these requirements, a nano-level 3-D shape extraction method has been developed. Here, the basic idea of the method and the simulation result are described. To extract a nano-level 3-D shape, the method using some interference images is effective. Interference image is produced by light reflected by LSI and light, which is not reflected by LSI. At this time, if the light, which is not reflected by LSI, is changed at regular intervals, the brightness of same coordinate of interference images change like a sine wave. When each heights of LSI differ between coordinates, the brightness of interference image differs. And the phases of brightness pattern differ according to height between each pixel. To measure heights from these phases, the pattern matching method was used and compared it with template images. The algorithm and system to process at the same times it taken in interference images is described. Also, to meet with the requirement to measure more than wave-length, the combination method of multiple wavelength lasers has been introduced. It enables to measure 100 um height differences with nano-level accuracy
In the medical field and in biotechnology application, a new type of human scale teleoperating system that can carry out three-dimensional high-speed micromanipulation has urgently been demanded. It is our purpose to develop a new type of human scale operating system for microoperation that can manipulate a microobject. In this paper, we deal with a human scale teleoperating system. In order to operate microobject in human scale, the working table and micromanipulator with multi DOF are demanded to be developed. So we propose a macro/micro mechanism for the system. Firstly, we design a precision parallel micromechanism with 6 DOF (10 /spl mu/m moving range, 10 nm resolving power), and compose the macro/micro mechanism. Then, we also did the complex control for the macro/micro mechanism. The experimental results indicate that the proposed macro/micro mechanism can be controlled by teleoperation, and it is very useful for human scale microoperation system.
Industrial characters are printed on products to control the production processes and the qualities in production lines. Dotted characters are frequently used for this purpose. Because of the dotted characters' discontinuity, it is difficult to recognize these characters. A human can read these dotted characters without many problems. To introduce this human ability to read dotted characters, a dotted industrial character reading system has been introduced which consists of many parallel procedures to execute human cognitive functions and model based recognition abilities.
