Papers
21
Total Citations
587
H-Index
9
About
Masaki Onishi is a leading roboticist whose work sits at the critical intersection of soft robotics, human-robot interaction, and sensor fusion. He is best known as the principal developer of the **RI-MAN** platform, a pioneering human-interactive robot designed for nursing and care tasks. Onishi’s major contributions include the creation of a full-body, soft areal tactile sensor system that allows robots to safely and dexterously share physical space with humans—a foundational achievement in the field, with his seminal 2008 paper on the topic garnering over **250 citations**. He extended this work by generating human-like care behaviors on the RI-MAN platform, demonstrating how robots can perform complex physical assistance tasks. Beyond tactile sensing, Onishi has advanced underwater robotics using ionic polymer artificial muscles (78 citations) and, more recently, pushed the boundaries of autonomous perception through self-supervised neural audio-visual sound source localization and efficient stereo matching on embedded GPUs. His latest work on implicit neural fusion for LiDAR and camera systems (2023) addresses a critical challenge in sensor calibration, cementing his reputation as a researcher who consistently solves real-world robotics problems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Development of the Tactile Sensor System of a Human-Interactive Robot “RI-MAN”252 citations · 2008
- 2
- 3Generation of Human Care Behaviors by Human-Interactive Robot RI-MAN70 citations · 2007
- 4A Soft Human-Interactive Robot RI-MAN37 citations · 2006
- 5Development and Evaluation of a Human-interactive Robot Platform "RI-MAN"36 citations · 2007
- 6Efficient stereo matching on embedded GPUs with zero-means cross correlation23 citations · 2021
- 7
- 8INF: Implicit Neural Fusion for LiDAR and Camera11 citations · 2023
- 9Development of Soft Areal Tactile Sensors for Human-Interactive Robots11 citations · 2006
- 10