This paper presents a recognition method of human daily-life action. The method utilizes hierarchical structure of actions and describes it as tree. We modelize actions by Continuous Hidden Markov Models which output timeseries feature vectors extracted by Feature Extraction Filter based on knowledge of human. In this method, recognition starts from the root, competes the likelihoods of childnodes, chooses the maximum one as recognition result of the level, and goes to deeper level. The advantages of hierarchical recognition are:1)recognition of various levels of abstraction, 2)simplification of low-level models, 3)response to novel data by decreasing degree of details. Experimental result shows that the method is able to recognize some basic human actions.

In this paper, we propose a robust online action recognition algorithm with a segmentation scheme that detects start and end points of action occurrences. In other words, the algorithm estimates reliably what kind of actions occurring at present time. The algorithm has following characteristics. 1) The algorithm incorporates human knowledge about relation between action names in order to simplify and toughen the algorithm, thus our algorithm can label robustly multiple action names at the same time. 2) The algorithm uses time-series Action Probability that represents the likelihood of each action occurrence at every frame time.3) The classification technique with hidden Markov models (HMMs) enables the algorithm to detect robustly and immediately the segmental points. The experimental results using real motion capture data show that our algorithm not only decreases effectively the latency for detecting the segmental points but also prevents the system from making unnecessary segments due to the error of time-series action probability.

Japan has involved several social problems, e.g., large scale disasters and aging of infrastructures, and the robots working in a related special environment have been expected for the countermeasures. In order to accelerate the utilization of the robots, we need not only the development of technology but also the enforcement of comprehensive social system. In this aim, New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), had launched "Research Project on Standardization, Safety Standards and Consolidation of Competitiveness of Special Environment Robots(SERs) and Systems" in FY2012.The final report of the research published on March 2013, which contains the three parts as: 1) clarification of political positioning of SERs, 2) clarification of mid-long term issues that Japan should pursue, and 3) strategic planning of standardization, safety standards and the competitiveness. In this paper, a summary of the first part of the report is described, which includes 1)R&D and in-Practice Activity, 2)political positioning, 3)operational framework for further practical use of SERs.

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