Morikazu Takegaki

Mitsubishi Electric (United States), Mitsubishi Electric (Japan)

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Morikazu Takegaki is a pioneering researcher in robotics, whose work has fundamentally shaped how robots perceive and navigate their environments. His primary contributions lie in the domains of **sensory feedback control** and **collision avoidance**, where he introduced novel frameworks that remain influential decades later. Takegaki is best known for developing the **Artificial Potential Field** method for robot manipulators, a concept detailed in his seminal 1984 paper (29 citations) and its 1985 follow-up (5 citations). This approach elegantly models a robot's workspace as a field of forces—attractive toward the goal and repulsive from obstacles—enabling smooth, real-time motion planning without complex path calculations. His most cited work, "Collision avoidance control among moving obstacles for a mobile robot on the fuzzy reasoning" (1988, 41 citations), broke new ground by integrating **fuzzy logic** with production rules to handle dynamic environments. In this system, the robot first assesses static and dynamic danger levels using fuzzy inference, then selects an evasive action from a decision table. This heuristic approach allowed robots to navigate safely among moving obstacles, a critical challenge for autonomous systems. Takegaki’s dual legacy—artificial potentials for manipulators and fuzzy reasoning for mobile robots—demonstrates a rare ability to bridge theoretical elegance with practical, real-world robotics. His work continues to inspire researchers in autonomous navigation and human-robot interaction.