Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Yasunori Saito’s research bridges human-robot interaction and agricultural robotics, with a focus on subtle, intuitive communication and precision monitoring. His most cited work explores “artificial subtle expressions” (ASEs)—blinking light patterns that signal a robot’s internal state during speech interaction, reducing utterance collisions and improving user experience. In a 2011 study (16 citations), he identified which blinking patterns users found most agreeable, laying groundwork for non-verbal cues in social robotics. A follow-up (2012) examined how robot appearance and ASEs jointly shape user impressions. Saito also contributed to precision agriculture, developing a “mobile robotic field server” (2014) that combines a stable walking mechanism with a lightweight manipulator for field- and fruit-scale crop monitoring. This system enables flexible, wide-area data collection by coordinating multiple field servers. While his citation counts are modest, Saito’s work on ASEs offers a novel, low-cost approach to improving human-robot dialogue, and his agricultural robot addresses real-world needs in scalable crop monitoring. His research exemplifies how subtle design choices—in both social and functional robotics—can significantly enhance system usability and practical impact.