• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.79-95
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• 2014

We are at the dawn of a new era in which the importance of robots will be evaluated on the basis of not only their functions but also their appearance. Therefore, those manufacturers who continue to develop robots that only offer convenience and do not keep up with the emerging trends might be weeded out from the robot market in the future. This study empirically tested and verified the ways in which the commercial value of wearable robots is enhanced when they are stylishly attired, using user and work environment analysis. For the purpose of this study, a styling development project for wearable robots was undertaken and applied to the actual development of these robots. Based on the results of the study, a new styling process for such robots was established. Those manufacturers who will realize the importance of styling of robots and develop robots using this process shall become the trendsetters in designing stylized robots and lead the robot industry in the future.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.33 no.10
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• pp.837-843
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• 2016

This paper presents a position control strategy for a pump-controlled electro-hydrostatic actuator (EHA) using feedforward control with disturbance compensation. As the disturbance observer is used to estimate nonlinear dynamics of EHA, which has valve-opening conditionals, as well as external disturbances, an additional feedforward control is adopted to achieve rapid response. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified through experiment using an EHA test bench. The proposed controller shows better tracking performance compared with a conventional PID controller.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.29 no.11
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• pp.1199-1206
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• 2012

Recently, technologies to help the elderly or disabled people who have difficulty in walking are being developed. In order to develop these technologies, it is necessary to construct a system that gathers the gait data of people and analysis of these data is also important. In this research, we constructed the development of sensor system which consists of pressure sensor, three-axis accelerometer and two-axis gyro sensor. We used k-means clustering algorithm to classify the data for characterization, and then calculated the symmetry index with histogram which was produced from each cluster. We collected gait data from sensors attached on two subjects. The experiment was conducted for two kinds of gait status. One is walking with normal gait; the other is walking with abnormal gait (abnormal gait means that the subject walks by dragging the right leg intentionally). With the result from the analysis of acceleration component, we were able to confirm that the analysis technique of this data could be used to determine gait symmetry. In addition, by adding gyro components in the analysis, we could find that the symmetry index was appropriate to express symmetry better.