FUN ROBO LAB. — Nishizawa Laboratory

About the Laboratory

FUN ROBO LAB. (Nishizawa Laboratory) belongs to the Intelligent Systems Course, Department of Complex and Intelligent Systems, School of Systems Information Science, Future University Hakodate. The Principal Investigator is Associate Professor Toshihiro Nishizawa.

We research robot and drone systems for infrastructure maintenance, logistics, disaster response and tourism. Using system design and architecture design methods, we analyze the social issues of the Hakodate region and aim to develop systems that are optimal for all the stakeholders involved.

Principal Investigator

Toshihiro Nishizawa, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Complex and Intelligent Systems, School of Systems Information Science, Future University Hakodate

Affiliation

Intelligent Systems Course, Department of Complex and Intelligent Systems, School of Systems Information Science, Future University Hakodate

Position

Associate Professor (since April 2024)

Degree

Ph.D. in Engineering

Research fields

Robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, drone traffic management systems, spacecraft onboard sensors, system design

Background

Joined NEC Corporation in 1996 and worked on research and business development of the personal robot PaPeRo, onboard sensors for spacecraft including Hayabusa2 and the H-II Transfer Vehicle "Kounotori", infrastructure inspection drones, and drone traffic management systems. After serving at the Digital Architecture Design Center of the Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA), he joined Future University Hakodate in April 2024.

External appointments

• Subcommittee Member, Key and Advanced Technology R&D through Cross Community Collaboration Program (K Program), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)
• Technical Committee Member, New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO)
• Professional Director and Sub-leader of the Drone Task Force, Public-Private Co-Creation Council for Disaster Management DX
• Vice Chair, Minami-Hokkaido Drone Utilization Promotion Council

University profile

Future University Hakodate faculty list: NISHIZAWA, Toshihiro, Associate Professor

Research

Drone systems (Drone Shot Project)

The Drone Shot Project is the laboratory's central project, led by Associate Professor Toshihiro Nishizawa as Principal Investigator.

Industrial drones are expensive to introduce and require skilled pilots, which slows their adoption. Our laboratory addresses both problems with a system built from low-cost consumer drones and tablets, operated easily through automatic flight control.

• Drone Shot Creator: a VR-based flight path design tool and simulator. Users place waypoints directly in 3D space and simulate the aerial footage on the spot.
• Drone Shot Rescue: a drone imaging system for disaster situation assessment. Operators at a disaster site can generate and check 3D data easily and share information quickly.
• Drone Shot Memories: a commemorative drone filming service for tourist sites, with automated aerial filming in which the traveler is the subject.

UAS traffic management (UTM)

Prof. Nishizawa served as project leader for the international standard ISO 23629-5:2023 on the functional structure of UAS traffic management. We study traffic management architecture and pilot interfaces that support responses to abnormal situations.

Robot systems

We design the roles that robots, which can act on and measure the real world, should play in society. Research on social communication robots is carried out jointly with the laboratory of Associate Professor Junichi Osada, Department of Media Architecture, Future University Hakodate.

Members

Faculty

Toshihiro Nishizawa (Associate Professor)

Students — Drone area (Drone Shot Project)

• Taiyo Sawada (澤田 太陽), 4th-year undergraduate
• Yota Arimoto (有本 陽太), 4th-year undergraduate
• Kureha Onishi (大西 紅葉), 4th-year undergraduate
• Sota Uchiyama (内山 颯太), 4th-year undergraduate
• Satoru Takahashi (髙橋 慧流), 4th-year undergraduate
• Ryoko Tanaka (田中 遼洸), 2nd-year undergraduate

Students — Robot area

• Kazuyoshi Sawada (澤田 一嘉), 4th-year undergraduate
• Taichi Shoji (所司 泰知), 4th-year undergraduate

All eight are undergraduate students of the School of Systems Information Science, Future University Hakodate (academic year 2026).

Achievements

2026

• Satoru Takahashi and Yota Arimoto (4th-year undergraduates; advisor: Toshihiro Nishizawa), Best Poster Award, JUIDA Technical Journal Poster Session, Japan Drone 2026 (Makuhari Messe, Chiba, June 3–5, 2026).
• Toshihiro Nishizawa, "Evaluation of a VR-based Flight Path Design System for Drones" (oral presentation, in Japanese), 73rd Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for the Science of Design, June 12–14, 2026.
• At the same conference, laboratory members gave six further oral and poster presentations jointly with the Osada Laboratory.
• "Toward Countermeasures against Crow Dropping Damage: Understanding Individual Behavioral Rules for Guiding Crow Flocks" (oral presentation), 38th SICE Symposium on Decentralized Autonomous Systems, Hamamatsu, February 19, 2026.

The conference presentations below were co-authored by Toshihiro Nishizawa with students and collaborators. All were presented in Japanese; the titles are English translations.

2025

• 72nd Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for the Science of Design (June 2025), five presentations:
  • "Exploring Future Visions of Hakodate City with a Backcasting Approach" (A3-07)
  • "An Attempt at UI/UX Design Education Using Generative AI" (A6-02)
  • "Building a Platform for Entertainment Robot Development" (PB-02)
  • "A Study on the Character and Presence of Social Robots" (PB-03)
  • "A Commemorative Drone Filming Service: User Evaluation in a Drone Experiment in Chichibu" (PB-04)
• 63rd Aircraft Symposium (October 2025), two presentations:
  • "A Study of Flight Path Creation Using Virtual Reality Technology" (JASS-2025-5267)
  • "Research and Development of 3D Reconstruction of Disaster Sites from Drone Aerial Imagery" (JASS-2025-5056)
• Japan Marketing Academy Conference 2025, two presentations:
  • "Exploring a Vision Design Method from the Consumer's Perspective Using Generative AI"
  • "A Study of Video Expression Methods for a Commemorative Tourist Filming Service Using Drone Aerial Imagery"
• "Crows Returning to Roost: Exploring the Invisible Rules That Move the Flock" (poster), 44th Annual Meeting of the Japan Ethological Society, Hakodate, November 24, 2025.

2024

• "UI/UX Design for AI," 65th Annual Conference of the Japan Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (June 2024).
• "A Proposal for a Commemorative Drone Filming System for Tourism," Annual Conference of the Robotics Society of Japan (September 2024).
• Human Interface Symposium 2024 (September 2024), three presentations:
  • "A Study of Social Robots for Active Seniors"
  • "Development of the Entertainment Robot Ikamii"
  • "Design and Development of Letter-shaped Robot Motive Characters"
• 15th Conference of the 1st Branch, Japanese Society for the Science of Design (September 2024), four posters and two lightning talks:
  • "Exploring Issues of Future Hakodate City with a Backcasting Approach" (poster)
  • "A Proposal for New Interaction Design with Physical Letters" (poster)
  • "A UI/UX Design Proposal for Social Robots for Active Seniors" (poster)
  • "Development of the Entertainment Robot Ikamii" (poster)
  • "A Proposal for a Commemorative Drone Filming System for Tourism" (lightning talk)
  • "A GUI Design Proposal for a Drone Flight Route System" (lightning talk)

International standardization

• ISO 23629-5:2023, "UAS traffic management (UTM) — Part 5" (published April 26, 2023). An international standard on the functional structure of UAS traffic management. Nishizawa served as project leader and compiled the document with experts from multiple countries.

Journal papers

• Toshihiro Nishizawa, "Drone Traffic Management Systems" (peer-reviewed survey article, in Japanese), IEICE Communications Society Magazine "B-plus," No. 73 (Summer 2025), June 2025.
• Toshihiro Nishizawa, Shin'ichi Yuta, et al., "A Dialogue System for Confirming Handling Methods to Reduce the Risk of Accidents with Home Robots" (peer-reviewed, in Japanese), Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, Vol. 30, No. 5, June 2012.
• Miki Sato, Toru Iwasawa, Akihiko Sugiyama, Toshihiro Nishizawa, Yosuke Takano, "A Single-Chip Speech Dialogue Module and Its Evaluation on a Personal Robot, PaPeRo-mini" (peer-reviewed), IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences, April 2009.

Earlier Work (University of Tsukuba and NEC Corporation)

Work before joining Future University Hakodate in April 2024. Prof. Nishizawa worked at NEC Corporation from 1996, and from October 2020 was seconded to the Digital Architecture Design Center of the Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA).

International conference papers

• Toshiaki Yamashita, Toshihiro Nishizawa, et al., "Hammering-test System for Bridge/Tunnel Inspection Using Flying Robot," The Fourteenth East Asia-Pacific Conference on Structural Engineering and Construction (EASEC-14), January 2016.
• Toshiaki Yamashita, Motoaki Shimizu, So Nishimura, Toshihiro Nishizawa, et al., "In-orbit and Networked Optical Ground Stations Experimental Verification Advanced Testbed (INNOVA)," IEEE International Conference on Space Optical Systems and Applications (ICSOS), May 2014. (peer-reviewed)
• Toshihiro Nishizawa, et al., "Proposed System of Unlocking Potentially Hazardous Function of Robot Based on Verbal Communication," 2011 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration (SII), December 2011. (peer-reviewed)
• Miki Sato, Toru Iwasawa, Akihiko Sugiyama, Toshihiro Nishizawa, Yosuke Takano, "A Compact Speech Dialogue Module and Its Evaluation on a Personal Robot PaPeRo-mini," 2009 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2009. (peer-reviewed)
• Tetsuya Munekata, Yoshihiro Fujita, Toshihiro Nishizawa, "New Learning Environment for Enhancing Storytelling Activities of Children with Intellectual Disabilities/Autism Using a Personal Robot in the Classroom," ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2009), February 2009. (peer-reviewed)
• Akitoshi Okumura, Takahiro Ikeda, Toshihiro Nishizawa, et al., "Multimedia Blog Creation System through Dialogue with Intelligent Robot," Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007), June 2007.
• Toshihiro Nishizawa, Shinichi Ohnaka, Yoshihiro Fujita, "Safety Design for Childcare Robot, PaPeRo," Workshop on Technical Challenges for Dependable Robots in Human Environments, June 2005.
• Nobuaki Takanashi, Toshihiro Nishizawa, et al., "Complete Modular Links for Hyper Redundant Robots," COE/Super Mechano-Systems Workshop, February 1999.
• Nobuaki Takanashi, Toshihiro Nishizawa, et al., "Complete Modular Links as a Motion Agent for Virtual-real World Connection," International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM 1996), September 1996. (peer-reviewed)
• Toshihiro Nishizawa, Akihisa Ohya, Shin'ichi Yuta, et al., "A Development of Autonomous Tractor for Agricultural Field - Positioning System and Its Experiment," International Symposium on Robotics and Manufacturing (ISRAM 1996), May 1996. (peer-reviewed)
• Toshihiro Nishizawa, Akihisa Ohya, Shin'ichi Yuta, "An Implementation of On-board Position Estimation for a Mobile Robot - EKF Based Odometry and Laser Reflector Landmarks Detection," IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 1995), May 1995. (peer-reviewed)

Domestic conference presentations and technical articles

Forty presentations and articles in Japanese between 1994 and 2020; the full list is on the Japanese page. Selected items (titles are English translations):

• "Development and Interconnection Testing of a Drone Traffic Management System," 4th UTM Symposium, February 2020.
• "Development of a Hammering-test Flying Robot System for Bridge Inspection," JSME Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics 2018, June 2018.
• "Research and Development of a UAS Traffic Management System for Safe, Secure and Efficient Logistics," Japan Drone 2018 project forum, March 2018.
• "Performance Evaluation of a Flying Robot System for Infrastructure Inspection," 54th Aircraft Symposium, Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences, October 2016.
• "Development of Compact Free-space Optical Communication Equipment," 58th Space Sciences and Technology Conference, November 2014.
• "Development of a Domestically Produced Rendezvous Laser Sensor for the HTV," 57th Space Sciences and Technology Conference, October 2013.
• "Safety Case Studies of Service Robots (1): The Childcare Robot PaPeRo," Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, Vol. 25, No. 8, November 2007.
• "Sensing and Autonomous Behavior of the Personal Robot PaPeRo," Annual Conference of the Robotics Society of Japan, September 2001.
• "Self-position Estimation of a Mobile Robot Using Laser Reflectors as Landmarks," Annual Conference of the Robotics Society of Japan, November 1994.

National projects

• Principal researcher, NEDO project "Realization of an Energy-Saving Society with Robots and Drones / Development of UAS Traffic Management Systems and Collision Avoidance Technologies / Remote Identification of Aircraft and Airspace Sharing with Manned Aircraft" (FY2019–FY2021). Developed and demonstrated drone remote ID and an information-sharing system with manned aircraft.
• Principal researcher, NEDO project "Realization of an Energy-Saving Society with Robots and Drones / Development of UAS Traffic Management Systems and Collision Avoidance Technologies / UAS Traffic Management System for Safe, Secure and Efficient Logistics and Other Services" (FY2017–FY2019). Led a demonstration with 29 operators that achieved high-density operation of 100 flights per hour within one square kilometer.
• Principal researcher, Cabinet Office Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP), "Hammering-test Flying Robot System for Bridge and Tunnel Inspection" (FY2014–FY2018).
• Researcher, NEDO project on integrated energy storage and charging systems for next-generation service stations (FY2010–FY2011).
• Researcher, NEDO "Intelligent Robot Technology Software Project": communication intelligence for home and community robots (FY2008–FY2010).

Reports

• "Survey Report on Concepts of Operations (ConOps) for Drones" (in Japanese), IPA Digital Architecture Design Center, December 2022.
• "Architecture Design Report for Autonomous Mobile Robots" (in Japanese), Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and IPA Digital Architecture Design Center, July 2022. Nishizawa supervised the drone part as project leader.
• "Interim Report on Architecture Design for Drone Utilization" (in Japanese), IPA Digital Architecture Design Center, July 2021. Compiled by Nishizawa as project leader.
• Secretariat materials for the Drone Architecture Study Group (1st: November 2021; 2nd: March 2022; 3rd: August 2022), IPA Digital Architecture Design Center. Nishizawa chaired the group.

Patents (registered in Japan)

Titles are English translations.

• "Inspection System, Control Device, Control Method, and Program," Japanese Patent No. 6891884, registered May 31, 2021.
• "Reused Secondary Battery Supply Forecasting System and Method," Japanese Patent No. 6066330, registered January 25, 2017.
• "Operation Support Method, System, Device, and Program," Japanese Patent No. 5472118, registered April 16, 2014.
• "Handling Method Confirmation Apparatus," Japanese Patent No. 5186886, registered April 24, 2013.
• "Robot, Robot Control Method, and Robot Control Program," Japanese Patent No. 4555039, registered September 29, 2010.
• "Vacuum Cleaner Control Device, Vacuum Cleaner, Robot, and Vacuum Cleaner Control Method," Japanese Patent No. 4555035 (abandoned), registered September 29, 2010.
• "Robot, Control Method Therefor, and Program," Japanese Patent No. 4407056, registered February 3, 2010.
• "Robot, Robot Control Device, Control Method, and Computer-Readable Recording Medium," Japanese Patent No. 3214476, registered October 2, 2001.
• "Robot Apparatus," Japanese Patent No. 3173653, registered March 30, 2001.
• "Robot Operating Device," Japanese Patent No. 3085370, registered September 4, 2000.

In addition, ten patent applications have been published.

Contact

E-mail

nishizaw@fun.ac.jp (Toshihiro Nishizawa)

Office

Room R609, Future University Hakodate

Address

Future University Hakodate, 116-2 Kamedanakano-cho, Hakodate, Hokkaido 041-8655, Japan

University

Future University Hakodate official website