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About

Dr. Etsuko Ueda is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction and telecommunication robotics, with a career dedicated to making robotic systems more expressive, graceful, and practically useful. Her work centers on three key areas: facial expression telecommunication, quantification of human-like motion elegance, and agricultural robotics. Dr. Ueda’s most significant contributions include developing a multi-modal telecommunication system using the facial expression robot “Infanoid2,” which measures an operator’s facial information to project realistic expressions to remote locations—a breakthrough for smoother, more natural communication beyond traditional speech-only methods. She has also pioneered the identification of “gracefulness feature parameters” for hand-over motions and quantified elegant movements for receptionist android robots, bridging engineering and aesthetics. Her work on a mobile robot for environmental measurement in greenhouses demonstrates her commitment to applying robotics to precision agriculture, enabling distributed data collection to improve crop productivity. While her citation counts (ranging from 2 to 5 per paper) reflect a focused, emerging impact, Dr. Ueda’s interdisciplinary approach—combining facial expression analysis, motion quality metrics, and field robotics—positions her as a thoughtful innovator whose work lays the groundwork for more empathetic and functional robots in both social and agricultural settings.