• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.35-40
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• 2010

Skyline extraction in mountainous images which has been used for navigation of vehicles or micro unmanned air vehicles is very hard to implement because of the complexity of skyline shapes, occlusions by environments, dfficulties to detect precise edges and noises in an image. In spite of these difficulties, skyline extraction is avery important theme that can be applied to the various fields of unmanned vehicles applications. In this paper, we developed a robust skyline extraction algorithm using two-scale canny edge images, topological information and location of the skyline in an image. Two-scale canny edge images are composed of High Scale Canny edge image that satisfies good localization criterion and Low Scale Canny edge image that satisfies good detection criterion. By applying each image to the proper steps of the algorithm, we could obtain good performance to extract skyline in images under complex environments. The performance of the proposed algorithm is proved by experimental results using various images and compared with an existing method.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.47-52
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• 2013

In order to operate a search and rescue robot in hazardous area, the robot requires high mobility and adaptable locomotion for moving in unpredictable environments. In this paper, we propose the deformable soft wheel robot that can produce three kinds of driving modes; caterpillar driving mode, normal wheel driving mode, legged-wheel driving mode. The robot changes its driving mode as it faces the various obstacles such as a small gap, stairs etc. Soft film and composite materials are used for fabrication of deformable wheel structure and Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) coil spring actuators are attached on the structure as an artificial muscle. Film lamination and an composite manufacturing process is introduced and the robot design is required to be modified and compromised to applying the manufacturing process. The prototype is developed and tested for verifying feasibility of the deformable wheel locomotion.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.11-17
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• 2013

'Multi-scale mass-deployable cooperative robots' is a next generation robotics paradigm where a large number of robots that vary in size cooperate in a hierarchical fashion to collect information in various environments. While this paradigm can exhibit the effective solution for exploration of the wide area consisting of various types of terrain, its technical maturity is still in its infant state and many technical hurdles should be resolved to realize this paradigm. In this paper, we propose to develop new design and manufacturing methodologies for the multi-scale mass-deployable cooperative robots. In doing so, we present various fundamental technologies in four different research fields. (1) Adaptable design methods consist of compliant mechanisms and hierarchical structures which provide robots with a unified way to overcome various and irregular terrains. (2) Soft composite materials realize the compliancy in these structures. (3) Multi-scale integrative manufacturing techniques are convergence of traditional methods for producing various sized robots assembled by such materials. Finally, (4) the control and communication techniques for the massive swarm robot systems enable multiple functionally simple robots to accomplish the complex job by effective job distribution.