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About

Masahito Togami is a pioneering roboticist whose research centers on human-symbiotic robotics—machines designed to coexist and assist people in daily life. His most significant contribution is the development of the EMIEW robot platform, a self-balancing two-wheeled autonomous mobile robot engineered for close human interaction. Togami’s work addresses two critical challenges for such robots: robust automatic speech recognition in noisy, real-world environments, and accurate sound source localization. He introduced innovative direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods, including the modified delay-and-sum beamformer based on sparseness (MDSBF) and stepwise phase difference restoration (SPIRE), which enable robots to determine both azimuth and elevation of human speech. His foundational paper on EMIEW’s basic design has garnered 53 citations, reflecting its influence on the field. Togami’s research also extends to learning topological maps under partially observable conditions, demonstrating a broad interest in autonomous navigation. By tackling the sensory and perceptual challenges of robots living alongside humans, Togami has laid essential groundwork for creating truly user-friendly, assistive machines that can understand and respond to their environment.