In this paper, novel ubiquitous concept of real reality robot game controlled by a mobile server robot is proposed. Real reality robot game means that two real robots controlled by humans/computers through the internet are playing a boxing game. The mobile server robot captures playing images of the boxing game and sends them to GUI on the screen of human operators' PC. The human operator can login to the boxing game from any computer in any place if he/she is permitted. Remote control of a boxing robot by a motion capture system through network is implemented. Successful motion control of a boxing robot remotely controlled by a motion capture system through network can be achieved. In addition, real boxing games between a human and a computer are demonstrated.

The aim of this paper is to investigate a control framework for mobile robots, operating in shared environment with humans. The Intelligent Space (iSpace) can sense the whole space and evaluate the situations in the space by distributing sensors. The mobile agents serve the inhabitants in the space utilizes the evaluated information by iSpace. The iSpace evaluates the situations in the space and learns the walking behavior of the inhabitants. The human intelligence manifests in the space as a behavior, as a response to the situation in the space. The iSpace learns the behavior and applies to mobile agent motion planning and control. This paper introduces the application of fuzzy-neural network to describe the obstacle avoidance behavior teamed from humans. Simulation results are introduced to demonstrate the efficiency of this method.

Sensor networks are the results of convergence of very important technologies such as wireless communication and micro electromechanical systems. In recent years, sensor networks found a wide applicability in various fields such as health, environment and habitat monitoring, military, etc. A very important step for these many applications is pattern classification and recognition of data collected by sensors installed or deployed in different ways. But, pattern classification and recognition are sometimes difficult to perform. Systematic approach to pattern classification based on modern teaming techniques like Multivariate Gaussian mixture models, can greatly simplify the process of developing and implementing real-time classification models. This paper proposes a new recognition system which is hierarchically composed of many sensor nodes haying the capability of simple processing and wireless communication. The proposed system is able to perform classification of sensed data using the Multivariate Gaussian function. In order to verify the usefulness of the proposed system, it was applied to hand gesture recognition system.

Recently, with the development of service robots and with the new concept of ubiquitous world, the position estimation of mobile objects has been raised to an important problem. As pre-liminary research results, some of the localization schemes are introduced, which provide the relative location of the moving objects subjected to accumulated errors. To implement a real time localization system, a new absolute position estimation method for a mobile robot in indoor environment is proposed in this paper. Design and implementation of the localization system comes from the usage of active beacon systems (based upon RFID technology). The active beacon system is composed of an RFID receiver and an ultra-sonic transmitter: 1. The RFID receiver gets the synchronization signal from the mobile robot and 2. The ultra-sonic transmitter sends out the traveling signal to be used for measuring the distance. Position of a mobile robot in a three dimensional space can be calculated basically from the distance information from. Three beacons and the absolute position information of the beacons themselves. In some case, the mobile robot can get the ultrasonic signals from only one or two beacons, because of the obstacles located along the moving path. Therefore, in this paper, as one of our dedicated contribution, the position estimation scheme with less than three sensors has been developed. Also, the extended Kalman filter algorithm is applied for the improvement of position estimation accuracy of the mobile robot.

We study on the implementation of reconfigurable position control system which is based on Open Control Platform(OCP) for Unmanned Expedition Vehicles(UEV) in ubiquitous environment. The control system uses hierarchical control structure and OCP structure which contains three layers such as core OCP, reconfigurable control API(Application Programmer Interface), generic hybrid control API. The goal of our research is to implement an UEV control system using advanced software technology. As a specific control problem, we study a transition management problem between PID control and neural network control depending on fault or parameter change of the plant, i.e., UEV. The concept of the OCP-based software-enabled control can provide synergy effect by the integration of software component, middleware, network communication, and control, and thus can be applied to various systems in ubiquitous environment.

In this paper, Ubiquitous Home Mess-Cleanup Robot(UHMR), which has a practical function of the automatic mess-cleanup, is developed. The vacuum-cleaner had made the burden of house chore lighten but the operation labour of a vacuum-cleaner had been so severe. Recently, the cleaning robot was producted to perfectly solve the cleaning labour of a house but it also was not successful because it still had a problem of mess-cleaning, which was the clean-up of big trash and the arrangement of newspapers, clothes, etc. The cleaning robot is to just vacuum dust and small trash but has no function to arrange and take away before the automatic vacuum-cleaning. For this reason, the market for the cleaning robot is not yet built up. So, we need a design method and technological algorithm of new automatic machine to solve the problem of mess-cleanup in house. It needs functions of agile automatic navigation, novel manipulation system for mess-cleanup. The automatic navigation system has to be controlled for the full scanning of living room, to recognize the absolute position and orientation of tile self, the precise tracking of the desired path, and to distinguish the mess object to clean-up from obstacle object to just avoid. The manipulate,, which is not needed in the vacuum-cleaning robot, must have the functions, how to distinguish big trash to clean from mess objects to arrange, how to grasp in according to the form of mess objects, how to move to the destination in according to mess objects and arrange them. We use the RFID system to solve the problems in this paper and propose the reading algorithm of RFID tags installed in indoor objects and environments. Then, it should be an intelligent system so that the mess cleaning task can be autonomously performed in a wide variety of situations and environments. It needs to also has the entertainment functions for the good communication between the human and UHMR. Finally, the good performance of the designed UHMR is confirmed through the results of the mess clean-up and arrangement.

In the era of ubiquitous computing, human-friendly man-machine interface is getting more attention due to its possibility to offer convenient services. For this, in this paper, we introduce a 'Half-Mirror Interface System (HMIS)' as a novel type of human-friendly man-machine interfaces. Basically, HMIS consists of half-mirror, USB-Webcam, microphone, 2ch-speaker, and high-speed processing unit. In our HMIS, two principal operation modes are selected by the existence of the user in front of it. The first one, 'mirror-mode', is activated when the user's face is detected via USB-Webcam. In this mode, HMIS provides three basic functions such as 1) make-up assistance by magnifying an interested facial component and TTS (Text-To-Speech) guide for appropriate make-up, 2) Daily weather information provider via WWW service, 3) Health monitoring/diagnosis service using Chinese medicine knowledge. The second one, 'display-mode' is designed to show decorative pictures, family photos, art paintings and so on. This mode is activated when the user's face is not detected for a time being. In display-mode, we also added a 'healing-window' function and 'healing-music player' function for user's psychological comfort and/or relaxation. All these functions are accessible by commercially available voice synthesis/recognition package.

Object recognition in the field of robotics generally has depended on a computer vision system. Recently, RFID(Radio Frequency IDentification) has been suggested as technology that supports object recognition. This paper, introduces the advanced RFID-based recognition using a novel tag which is named a 3D tag. The 3D tag was designed to facilitate object recognition. The proposed RFID system not only detects the existence of an object, but also estimates the orientation and position of the object. These characteristics allow the robot to reduce considerably its dependence on other sensors for object recognition. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of the 3D tag-based RFID system. In addition, the estimation methods of position and orientation using the system are discussed.

This paper presents a robotic agent design and application in the ubiquitous intelligent space. We set up an experimental environment with Bluetooth host, Bluetooth client, furniture and home appliance, and robotic agents. First, the agents basically performed patrol guard to detect unexpected penetration, and to keep home safely from gas-leakage, electric leakage, and so on. They were out to patrol fur a robbery while navigating in a living room and a private room. In this task, we used an area-based action making and a hexagon-based Q-learning to control the agents. Second, the agents communicate with Bluetooth host device to access and control a home appliance. The Bluetooth host offers a manual control to person by inquiring a client robot when one would like to check some place especially. In this exercise, we organize asynchronous connection less (ACL) between the host and the client robots and control the robot maneuver by Bluetooth host controller interface (HCI).

This paper describes a design experience of a low-cost 6 DOF spatial tracker system where relative low accuracy and relatively long ranges, wireless communication will be achieved by means of low cost accelerometers and gyros with contemporary microprocessor. However, there are two key problems; one is the bias drift problem and the other is that single or double integration of acceleration signal suffers not only from noise but also from nonlinear effects caused by gravity. To be specific, beginning and stopping of hand motions needs to be accurately detected to initiate and terminate integration process to get position and pose of the hand from accelerometer and gyro signals, since errors due to noise and/or hand-shaking motions accumulated by integration processes. Several experimental results are shown to validate our proposed algorithms.

This paper proposes a ubiquitous robot, Ubibot, as an integration of three forms of robots: Software robot (Sobot), Embedded robot (Embot) and Mobile robot (Mobot). A Sobot is a virtual robot, which has the ability to move to any place or connect to any device through a network in order to overcome spatial limitations. It has the capacity to interpret the context and thus interact with the user. An Embot is embedded within the environment or within physical robots. It can recognize the locations of and authenticate the user or robot, and synthesize sensing information. Also it has the ability to deliver essential information to the user or other components of Ubibot by using various types of output devices. A Mobot provides integrated mobile service. In addition, Middleware intervenes different protocols between Sobot, Embot, and Mobot in order to incorporate them reliably. The services provided by Ubibot will be seamless, calm and context-aware based on the combination of these components. This paper presents the basic concepts and structure of Ubibot. A Sobot, called Rity, is introduced in order to investigate the usability of the proposed concepts. Rity is a 3D synthetic character which exists in the virtual world, has a unique IP address and interacts with human beings through Vision Embot, Sound Embot, Position Embot and Voice Embot. Rity is capable of moving into a Mobot and controlling its mobility. In doing so, Rity can express its behavior in the virtual world, for example, wondering or moving about in the real world. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of implementing a Ubibot in a networked environment.

This paper discusses a skeleton feature extraction method for ubiquitous robot system. The skeleton features are used to analyze human motion and pose estimation. In different conventional feature extraction environment, the ubiquitous robot system requires more robust feature extraction method because it has internal vibration and low image quality. The new hybrid silhouette extraction method and adaptive skeleton model are proposed to overcome this constrained environment. The skin color is used to extract more sophisticated feature points. Finally, the experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method.

In order to increase the autonomous navigation capability of a mobile robot, it is very crucial to develop a method for the robot to be able to recognize a priori hon structured environmental characteristics. This paper proposes an ultrasonic sensor based real-time method for recognizing a priori known structured indoor environmental characteristics like a wall and comer Unlike the methods reported in the literature the information obtained from the sensor can be processed in real-time by extended Kalman filter to update estimations of the position and orientation of robot with respect to known environmental characteristics.

In this paper, it is proposed that the method for constituting pressure control system controlled by Direct Drive Valve (DDV). The DDV has a pressure-feedback-loop itself. It can eliminate non-linearity and uncertainty oi hydraulic system such as uncertain discharge coefficient and change of bulk-modulus. However, the internal feedback-loop can not compensate them perfectly. And fixed gain of the DDV's internal feedback-loop is not proper to apply it through wide pressure range. The steady state error and nonlinear characteristic of transient behaviour is observed in the experiment. So another controller is needed for the desirable performance of the system. To compose the controller, the pressure control system controlled by DDV is modeled mathematically and the parameters of the model are identified using signal-compression method. Then sliding mode controller is designed based on mathematical model. Desirable performance of the pressure control system controlled by DDV is obtained.

As development of digital technology, many kinds of multimedia data are used variously and requirements for effective use by user are increasing. In order to transfer information fast and precisely what user wants, effective retrieval method is required. As existing multimedia data are impossible to apply the MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 technologies which are aimed at compression, store and transmission. So MPEG-7 is introduced as a new technology for effective management and retrieval of multimedia data. In this paper, we extract content-based features using color descriptor among the MPEG-7 standardization visual descriptor, and reduce feature data applying PCA(Principal Components Analysis) technique. We model the cerebral cortex and hippocampal neural network in engineering domain, and team content-based feature vectors fast and apply the hippocampal neural network algorithm to compose of optimized feature. And then we present fast and precise retrieval effect when indexing and retrieving.