Masayuki Inaba

About

Masayuki Inaba is a pioneering robotics researcher whose work spans intelligent robot learning, humanoid systems, aerial robotics, and assistive technologies. Based at the University of Tokyo, Inaba has made foundational contributions to the field over three decades, earning thousands of citations across diverse research domains. His landmark 1994 paper, "Learning by Watching" (682 citations), introduced a groundbreaking paradigm in which robots acquire reusable task knowledge by observing human demonstrations — a concept that presaged modern imitation learning and remains deeply influential. His sustained work on humanoid robots, including the musculoskeletal humanoid Kojiro and comprehensive motion planning frameworks, established critical foundations for dynamic, human-like robotic movement, collectively garnering hundreds of citations. Inaba's research extends impressively into practical applications: his autonomous tomato harvesting robot addresses agricultural labor shortages, while his home-assistant robot work (185 citations) directly confronts global aging-society challenges. His introduction of DRAGON, a transformable multi-degree-of-freedom aerial robot (197 citations), reflects his continued innovation at robotics' cutting edge. Additional contributions in graspless manipulation, real-time vision systems, and visual navigation demonstrate remarkable breadth. Across all domains, Inaba's research consistently bridges theoretical innovation with real-world societal impact, making him one of robotics' most versatile and enduring contributors.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Learning by watching: extracting reusable task knowledge from visual observation of human performance

   682 citations · 1994
2. 2
   Dynamically-Stable Motion Planning for Humanoid Robots

   268 citations · 2002
3. 3
   Visual navigation using view-sequenced route representation

   212 citations · 2002
4. 4
   Design, Modeling, and Control of an Aerial Robot DRAGON: A Dual-Rotor-Embedded Multilink Robot With the Ability of Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Aerial Transformation

   197 citations · 2018
5. 5
   Motion Planning for Humanoid Robots

   191 citations · 2005
6. 6
   Home-Assistant Robot for an Aging Society

   185 citations · 2012
7. 7
   Development of an autonomous tomato harvesting robot with rotational plucking gripper

   175 citations · 2016
8. 8
   An advanced musculoskeletal humanoid Kojiro

   163 citations · 2007
9. 9
   Pivoting: A new method of graspless manipulation of object by robot fingers

   155 citations · 2002
10. 10
    Robot vision system with a correlation chip for real-time tracking, optical flow and depth map generation

    148 citations · 2003

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links