IRT strategic initiative R&D funding strategy for a new technology area unifying RT and IT

Summary form only given. In the course of last two decades, IT created a vast virtual space called cyberworld. IT researchers have been trying to unify the real world that we actually live in and the ever growing cyberworld. There seems to be an essential limit to their efforts to combine the two, as their efforts focus on developing interfaces between the two worlds based on exchange of information poorly abstracted from the reality. On the other hand, the rapidly evolving robotics technology is now enabling support, enhancement, and replacement of human motion, daily activities, and even, in part, thinking. We believe creation of a new technology dealing with both real world and cyberworld as an entity should go beyond the IT's limitation, and is one of the most important lines of future Japanese R&D. Two of Japan's strong technology bases, robotics technology and information technology can join forces in creating the new area. We name this new area as IRT, abbreviating information and robotics technology. IRT can contribute to some vital visions of our society, including health and amenity, safety and security, and, sustainable development. We have illustrated the IRT's contributions as twelve "IRT platforms". The level of unit technologies for realizing each IRT platform are so highly set as to drive breakthroughs in the current key technologies, and further to promote basic scientific researches. As IRT research is transdisciplinary by nature, we should design IRT's R&D scheme so as to be effectively promoted by a variety of research players. What we should take into account is effective operation of multi-ministrial funding systems, effective research scheme of industry-academia-government collaboration, and aggressively innovative funding schemes.