JRC REVIEW No.74 2023 Technical Reports

- Special Issues : Life & Healthcare -

In Japan, which is facing a super-aging society, there is a growing shortage of caregivers for the elderly, which leads to insufficient attention in the act of care, resulting in many accidents such as tumbles and falls from the beds of the care receiver. UJRC considers the prevention of accidents at nursing care sites to be an important issue, works to prevent accidents involving care receivers at nursing care sites, and has developed the "Care Receiver Monitoring System," which applies its original sensing technology to predict and detect the movements of care receiver at an early stage to prevent accidents involving tumbles and falls. This system enables "prediction of the care receiver's behavior," which has been difficult with conventional care receiver monitoring systems and realizes highly accurate detection of risk events that may lead to accidents at nursing care sites and reliable notification of such events to caregivers.

Ueda Japan Radio Co.,Ltd.
Minoru oyamada

- Technical articles -

Prior to the market deployment of the local 5G system, JRC constructed a local 5G system on the demonstration floor in its facility, to verify the local 5G radio wave propagation characteristics and communication performance. Also, a real-time 4K video transmission system was constructed with the local 5G system, which provides the experience of 5G’s benefits such as ultra-high-speed transmission and ultra-low latency to potential customers and partner companies. Furthermore, an interface for connecting various applications with the local 5G system has been provided in collaboration with customers and partner companies were made possible. More than 20 municipal governments, universities, and companies have visited the facility as of now and a demonstration experiment has already been conducted in collaboration with one of these companies.

Sadayuki Katsumata 
Kenji Terada 
Kenji Inoue

- Technical articles -

In recent years, the importance of weather prediction for the purpose of mitigating damage from heavy rainfall disasters has increased. Since weather prediction uses observation data from weather radar, high-quality observation data is required to realize highly accurate weather prediction. In weather radar, there are cases where observation errors occur by mixing unwanted signals such as second-trip echoes and ground clutter in the observation data. With the aim of removing second- trip echoes and ground clutter that hinder accurate weather prediction, JRC has developed technologies related to the methods of "second-trip echo removal and range doubler processing" and "ground clutter suppression processing", and evaluated them using actual observation data from the weather radar delivered to the Japan Meteorological Agency. This development has realized the acquisition of highly accurate observation data by suppressing second-trip echoes and ground clutter at a high level. Furthermore, the rearranging of the extracted second-trip echoes has realized the expansion of the detection distance.

Yuta Fujishiro 
Shigeharu Shimamura 
Saori Kurihara

- Technical articles -

JRC has participated in the “Designing the Future of Full Autonomous Ship (DFFAS), hereinafter this project” in the five consortiums that comprise the “Joint Technological Development Program for the Demonstration of Fully Autonomous Ships” under the fully autonomous ship project "MEGURI 2040" administrated by the Nippon Foundation. This project is a large-scale open collaboration involving 30 domestic companies, in this project, JRC was in charge of “Developing a shore- side Fleet Operation Support System for Fully Autonomous Ships and Developing and Installing a shore-side Fleet Operation Center (FOC), hereinafter FOC”. Furthermore, by carrying out the demonstration navigation of a fully autonomous ship on a route of approximately 790 km, including the highly congested area with marine traffic, the usefulness of the advanced data analysis technology that supports fully autonomous navigation from a shore-side and the FOC that is essential for improving the safety of navigation have been demonstrated.

Tatsuya Enokido

- Group Companies Technical articles -

Research and development for autonomous driving of industrial vehicles (small mobilities) is being advanced for work support or automation, for countermeasures against the population decline of workers engaged in industries such as agriculture and construction. Millimeter-wave radar with excellent resolution is expected to be used for surrounding environment recognition to realize work support or automation; however, the inability of detecting height information obstructs expanding its potential application. In a work site where uneven ground and structures exist, reflected radar signals (signals, hereafter) arrive not only from the front but also from the ground or overhead reflectors which are impossible to be distinguished by conventional radar; therefore, detecting height information is hopeful to solve the problem by distinguishing those signals arriving from different heights. Similar to azimuth detection with a horizontal array of antennas, elevation detection can be realized by a vertical array of antennas. For detecting both azimuth and elevation with practical angular resolution, antennas should be arranged in a two-dimensional array consisting of more than 100 antenna elements. Against such unrealistic requirements, JRC Mobility (JRCM, hereafter) has developed an antenna array extension technology to synthesize a two-dimensional antenna array consisting of more than 100 elements, from only three transmitting antennas and six receiving antennas. As a result, JRCM has achieved 1.0° of angular accuracy for both azimuth and elevation which is sufficient for practical use. Enabling three-dimensional sensing, the novel technology of millimeter- wave radar is expected to expand the applications for farms, factories, offices, etc.

JRC Mobility Inc.
Yukinobu Tokieda 
Naotaka Ishimura 
Naoya Kezuka
Takuma Nishiyama

- Group Companies Technical articles -

Automated industrial machinery (for agriculture, construction, etc.) and robots (for transportation, security, etc.) are strongly expected to be realized for manpower saving as the countermeasure to the labor shortage caused by the recent decline in the working population as well as cost reduction. Realization of the automated machinery and robots (hereinafter “mobility”) relies on autonomous recognition of surrounding environment by sensing technology. In particular, the expected sensing technology ensures the safety of people coexisting in the vicinity of mobility devices with the capability of human identification and of detecting location accurately. However, such capability is hard to be achieved with a single sensor regardless of environment. JRC Mobility (JRCM) has developed a sensor fusion technology to detect the location of people accurately. The sensor fusion technology integrates the sensor information of monocular camera, which is suitable for object identification based on shape recognition, and 79 GHz band radar, which is suitable for detecting the location of objects. JRCM has confirmed through evaluation experiments that the new sensing technology is able to provide information useful for avoiding collision between mobility and people.

JRC Mobility Inc.
Masahiro Hoshi 
Kuniaki Yano 
Kohei Miyachi
Yukinobu Tokieda