Masaki Minami

Masaki is a Program Director of the Autonomous Mobile Robots Industry at Digital Architecture and Design Center, Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan. After receiving his Master's Degree in Media and Governance from Keio University in 1998, he engaged in research on core technologies of the Internet. Since 2011, he has been engaged in research and development of swarm control technology and management systems for drones, with the aim of understanding the state of the sky and distributing it as digital data. In 2015, he and his colleagues established the Drone Society Co-creation Consortium with the vision of a "drone based society," and served as its vice president until 2021. He has been advocating the "Tamura Model" as a regional development model that simultaneously promotes drone human resource development and industrial promotion, and has been promoting the utilization of drones in a wide range of fields, from primary industry to essential work, where the population is declining rapidly and there is a shortage of workers. As a part of STEAM education for young people, he has devised a combined learning program of programming, video, and art using drones, which is being deployed in elementary and junior high schools nationwide. Currently, at the Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan, he is leading the creation of an industrial architecture for autonomous mobile robots in general, including drones.