About

I originally studied civil engineering, entering university with the aim of becoming an engineer in the construction industry. Although I ultimately took the path of a researcher, the starting point of my interest remains the question of how to sustain the production infrastructure of agriculture. Fields and farm roads have been supported by agricultural civil engineering — most notably land improvement and farmland consolidation — but as the farming population declines, maintaining this infrastructure is becoming increasingly difficult. I have long been interested in a form of agriculture in which a single operator remotely supervises multiple machines and the machines travel autonomously between dispersed fields, as a way to automate the civil-engineering side of agriculture and to sustain its production infrastructure. With this motivation, my research has centered on remote monitoring and teleoperation for agricultural robots, with a particular focus on vehicle control under communication delay and the development of vision-based safety systems. Among these topics, teleoperation has been the area to which I have been most actively committed. I have investigated how communication delay affects the behavior of remote operators and have explored forms of agriculture in which farmland and farm work can be sustained without workers being physically present in the field. More recently, my interest has expanded from viewing teleoperation merely as a means of human intervention or temporary assistance in difficult situations to regarding it as a source of high-quality demonstration data that contains the decision-making processes of skilled operators. Tasks that demand precise control of implements, such as tillage, embody the fine-grained know-how of experienced operators. As the farming population declines, I believe it is essential to extract this knowledge before it is lost and to enable younger, less experienced workers to perform the same tasks. I expect imitation learning to become a practical method that bridges the automation of agricultural tasks that could not be described by rules and the succession of human skills. Through this research, I aim to pass on to the next generation both the production infrastructure of agriculture and the human skills that have sustained it.