Tasuku Yamawaki

About

Tasuku Yamawaki is a robotics researcher whose work spans manipulation planning, nonprehensile robotics, reconfigurable mechanisms, and human-robot cooperation. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering investigations into throwing manipulation, demonstrating that even a single-joint robotic arm can project objects to arbitrary positions beyond its physical reach and control their orientation with precision — a counterintuitive yet practically significant capability documented across several studies accumulating over 30 citations combined. His early work on self-reconfigurable parallel robots, particularly 4R and 5R closed kinematic chain systems with passive joints, addressed fundamental challenges in nonholonomic dynamic rolling control and versatile locomotion, earning recognition within the mechanisms community. Yamawaki has also contributed meaningfully to grasp planning through dynamics shaping, manipulation performance evaluation under gravity, and trajectory control under disturbance — areas critical to deploying robots in unstructured environments. More recently, his research has extended into human-robot collaboration, where he developed an iterative learning framework for variable impedance control that adaptively tunes robot compliance during cooperative tasks. With a body of work spanning over fifteen years and citations across multiple robotics subfields, Yamawaki represents a researcher consistently pushing the boundaries of low-degree-of-freedom systems to achieve surprisingly sophisticated manipulation outcomes.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Control for throwing manipulation by one joint robot

   22 citations · 2009
2. 2
   Nonholonomic dynamic rolling control of reconfigurable 5R closed kinematic chain robot with passive joints

   20 citations · 2004
3. 3
   Iterative learning of variable impedance control for human-robot cooperation

   17 citations · 2016
4. 4
   Effect of Gravity on Manipulation Performance of a Robotic Arm

   13 citations · 2007
5. 5
   Robotic nonprehensile catching: Initial experiments

   11 citations · 2014
6. 6
   4R and 5R parallel mechanism mobile robots

   11 citations · 2004
7. 7
   Arm trajectory planning by controlling the direction of end-point position error caused by disturbance

   7 citations · 2008
8. 8
   Learning control method for throwing an object more accurately with one degree of freedom robot

   6 citations · 2010
9. 9
   Grasp planning based on dynamics shaping

   6 citations · 2011
10. 10
    Parts assembly by throwing manipulation with a one-joint arm

    6 citations · 2010

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links