Hideki Sawai
Papers
24
Total Citations
178
H-Index
7
About
Hideki Sawai is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, psychophysics, and assistive technology. His research focuses primarily on the design and control of power assist robots for lifting heavy objects, with a particular emphasis on understanding how human operators perceive weight during robot-assisted tasks. Sawai's most significant contribution has been establishing psychophysical relationships between actual object weights and power-assisted weights, revealing a critical insight: objects lifted with power assist robots are consistently perceived as lighter than their true mass, yet operators unconsciously apply force based on actual weight. This discovery fundamentally informed how such systems should be controlled and designed. Across a series of influential papers published between 2009 and 2011, Sawai systematically investigated unimanual versus bimanual lifting, inertial versus gravitational force perception, and worst-case operational scenarios, culminating in practical design guidelines for industrial power assist systems. His most cited work (2010, 27 citations) directly addressed the challenge of aligning robot control with human perceptual limitations. Beyond lifting robots, Sawai also explored human-human cooperative motion and communication during object-carrying tasks, laying groundwork for more naturalistic human-robot collaboration. With over 140 cumulative citations, his body of work offers valuable, empirically grounded principles for engineers developing ergonomic robotic assistance systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10