This study aims to investigate the effects of whole-body vibration (WBV) exposure on the disturbance of standing balance function assuming that the cause of slip, trip and fall accidents in the land transportation industry is related to WBV exposure when traveling in vehicles. In the experiment, ten participants underwent 60 min of virtual driving in a driving simulator (DS) for WBV exposure. In addition, standing balance measurements were conducted before exposure, immediately after exposure, 2 min after exposure and 4 min after exposure. Four conditions were considered by combining two magnitudes of WBV exposure and the driver and passenger conditions. This study focused on two indexes of standing balance, namely, total length and enveloped area and the rate of change relative to the value before the vibration exposure was calculated. The rate of change remained almost constant at 1.0 in the control condition without vibration exposure, whereas that under vibration exposure conditions varied. Interestingly, the rate of change at 2 min after exposure remained high in the driver condition, but it decreased to almost 1.0 in the passenger condition. Since no difference appeared in the vibration acceleration measured at the seating surface between the driver and passenger conditions, it was believed that the difference between the driving and passenger conditions was related to fatigue caused by the accelerator-pedal operation. As a result of considering the percentage of the standing balance that returned to 1.0 after 4 min in most conditions, this study proposed that a rest period of several minutes be allowed from the experiment in which the participants were exposed to vibration at $0.5\mathrm{m}/{\mathrm{s}}^2$ rms for 60 min at the DS. Further basic experiments will be conducted to introduce another WBV exposure assessment, including loss of standing balance as a health indicator, to ISO 2631-1.

In this paper, in order to provide with an inexpensive solution to efficient bio-manipulation under microscope, we propose a macro-micro tele-operation system based on body image embedding. It is known in neuroscience that we could feel our body image for the object which is not our own body in certain conditions. Our idea is to utilize the body image illusion for generating high immersive feelings in bio-manipulation under microscope, instead of aiming at the perfect transparency, the conventional target of tele-manipulation system, which is difficult to attain. Our proposed system has two additional components as well as the conventional system where micro manipulators hydraulically connected to joysticks or dials handled by an operator are used for fine bio-manipulation under a microscope. The one component is for the body position/orientation consistency between proprioception and vision. In this component, due to appropriate use of a camera for a microscope, a visual display, mirrors and tiny dummy hands, an operator can see the magnified visual image of the tiny dummy hands similar to his/her own hands in shape at the position and orientation where he/she feel them proprioceptively. The other component is for the contact consistency between touch and vision. In this component, the contact between a tool grasped by an operator's hands and a manipulated object observed by eyes should coincide to the contact felt by his/her hand skin. To do this, haptic stimulators such as piezo actuators are activated at the timing of contact which is detected, for example, by the vision processing from the microscopic images.

The study aims to develop automatic transplanting equipment for chain pot seedlings. We intend to practice the shaft tillage cultivation using an autonomous farming robot. We had developed an autonomous working vehicle and automatic transplanting equipment for plug seedlings used in shaft tillage cultivation. To reinforce the robot system’s versatility, we developed transplanting equipment for the chain pot seedlings. We experimentally investigated the transplanting performance. Approximately 84% of the seedlings were automatically transplanted using the developed equipment. Since the equipment was performed well in the failure samples, we assumed that the cause of such failures was attributed to seedling quality. In addition, we measured the power consumption of the equipment used to build an electrical power supply system. Consequently, we calculated the power requirements for each process. Compared with the plug seedling equipment developed in the previous study, the chain pot seedlings’ power requirement was lower because the conveying actions of seedlings were different. In the next stage of our research, to construct a fully automatic system, we will consider the seedling raising method in which seedlings can become uniformly high-quality and investigate the plant establishment performance using the developed equipment.