Deputy Director:Shigeoki Hirai, Ph.D.
has participated in several national R&D projects contributing by the specialty of advanced telerobot systems. His R&D product includes development in the Advanced Robotics Project (1983-1990) of the MEISTER system that performs flame reaction experiments and in the Micromachine )Project (1991-2000) of a multi-agent robot system. In management contribution for the development of robotics, he served as sub-project-leader in the RT middleware project to develop an infrastructure for modularized and distributed robot systems (2002-2004). He currently serves as project leader in the Project for Strategic development of Advanced Robotics Elemental Technologies (2006-2010), which was planned and has been being conducted with the objective of sustained industrial commercialization of robot technologies. His long-term objective as a roboticist is the utilization of robot technologies to consolidate systems enabling sustainable social development taking account of environmental, energy and other issues, including aging and declining populations.
Profile
Shigeoki Hirai was born in 1950, Hiroshima. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in physical engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1973, 1975, and 1978 respectively. From 1978 to 2009, he had been with Electro technical Laboratory, MITI. Electrotechnical Laboratory and other research institutions under MITI were integrated into National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIST, Japan, in 2001, where he was inaugurated as Deputy-Director of Intelligent Systems Research Institute and Director in 2004. From April 2009, he has been with Chiba Institute of Technology and currently is Deputy-Director and Chief Strategist of the Future Robotics Technology Center.