• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.123-133
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• 1996

An automatic drum seeder was developed to improve the seeding operation. It consisted of a conveyor to transfer seedling trays, a seed-hopper to supply seeds, a drum to drop seeds on the tray, and an air blower to remove extra seeds. A photo sensor was used to detect the transfer of seedling trays, and its signal was fed into microcomputer which operated a stepping motor driving the drum. The seeds were adhered to the surface of drum by vacuum pressure, and were dropped into tray cells by compressed air. An air connection unit was devised to alternate between vacuum pressure and compressed air. A control program for the system, written in C language, could operate the drum at the given number of revolutions and revolutions per minute. The results showed that the air connection unit could operate well and the seeds were dropped satisfactorily into tray cells. In case of cabbage and perilla seeds, which are regular and spherical shape, the missing rate was low and the single seeding rate was more than 97%. Low missing rate and high multiple seeding rate were observed in lettuce seeds which have narrow ends with tight weight. The missing rate of pepper seed was very high because of heavy weight and irregular shape. To improve the performance of the seeder, adjustment of vacuum pressure based upon shape and weight of the seeds, careful selection of the material of drum, maintenance of consistent air blower pressure, and replacement of stepping motor to DC motor are recommended.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.220-227
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• 2009

In the process of oyster mushroom production, loading work of culture medium needs the most intensive labor power. Therefore, development of culture medium machine causes to reduce the manpower and cost. The main objective of this study is to develop the culture medium loading machine and investigate the optimal operation conditions and to evaluate the economic value of the machine. The results are summarized as follows: 1. Optimum transporting velocity of the conveyor was 0.61 m/s 2. Optimum speed of blower was 3183 rpm at the transporting velocity of 0.61 m/s with the loading quantity of 3.41 t/hr 3. Recommendable opening area ratio of pressure controller was 1/2 at the blower speed of 3183 rpm and the transporting velocity of 0.61 m/s 4. The break even point resulted in $240\;m^2$ of cultivating area compared to the method of with portable workbench, and $350\;m^2$ of cultivating area compared to the method of with a tractor and a truck.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.331-332
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• 2006

Transport systems which are the important part of the factory automation have much influence on improving productivity. Object transport systems are driven typically by the magnetic field and conveyer belt. In recent years, as the transmission and processing of information is required more quickly, demands of optical elements and semiconductors increase. However, conventional transport systems are not adequate for transportation of those. The reason is that conveyor belts can damage precision optical elements by the contact force and magnetic systems can destroy the inner structure of semiconductor by the magnetic field. In this paper, the levitation transport system using ultrasonic wave is developed for transporting precision elements without damages. Vibration modes of each flexural beam are verified by using Laser Scanning Vibrometer.

• Journal of Industrial Technology
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• v.30 no.A
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• pp.17-23
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• 2010

Recently, a large number of open-pit mines are planning to change their mining method to underground types because the environmental concerns and legal regulations are increased with a rise in the standard of living. The K silica mine, which is one of them and located in Kyunggi province, is planning the establishment of a vertical shaft which will be used for ore-pass channel in their new glory hole mining method. This vertical shaft will be designed to join with a horizontal gangway excavated from the ground level. In this new mining system, the excavated ore particles will be stored inside a shaft and transported out with a help of a conveyor belt. Therefore the hang-up of ore particles in a shaft, the control of gate at the bottom of a shaft, the installation of dog-leg at the gate should be investigated identically. In this study, the PFC-2D code which is one of the discrete element numerical methods has been applied to simulate the particle flow mechanism in a shaft, and the optimum mine design has been proposed to maximize the productivity and to minimize the system damage.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.24 no.7
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• pp.885-890
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• 2020

In the distance measurement system the time-to-digital conversion circuit used measures the distance using the time interval between the start signal and the stop signal. The time interval is generally converted to digital information using a counter circuit considering the response speed. Therefore, a clock signal with a high frequency is required to improve precision, and a clock signal with a high frequency is also required to measure fine distances. In this paper, a counter circuit was designed to increase the accuracy of distance measurement while using the same frequency. The circuit design was performed using a 0.18㎛ CMOS process technology, and the operation of the designed circuit was confirmed through HSPICE simulation. As a result of the simulation, it is possible to obtain an improvement of four times the precision compared to the case of using a general counter circuit.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.865-870
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• 2003

A motion controller has been used variously in industry such as semiconductor manufacture equipment, industrial robot, assembly/conveyor line applications and CNC equipment. There are several types of controller in motion control. One of these is a PC-based motion controller such as PCI or ISA, and another is stand-alone motion controller. The PC bus-based motion controller is popular because of improving bus architectures and GUI (Graphic User Interface) that offer convenience of use to user. There are some problems in this. The PC bus-based solution allows for only one of the form factors, so it has a poor flexibility. The overall system package size is bigger than other motion control system. And also, additional axes of control require additional slot, however the number of slots is limited. Furthermore, unwieldy and many wirings come to connect plants or I/O. The stand-alone motion controller has also this limit of axes of control and wiring problems. To resolve these problems, controller must have capability of operating as stand-alone devices that resides outside the computer and it needs network capability to communicate to each motion device. In this paper, a network-based stand-alone motion system is proposed. This system integrates PC and motion controller into one stand-alone motion system, and uses CAN (Controller Area Network) as network protocol. Single board computer that is type of 3.5" FDD form factor is used to reduce the system size and cost. It works with Windows XP Embedded as operating system. This motion system operates by itself or serves as master motion controller that communicates to slave motion controller. The Slave motion controllers can easily connect to master motion system through CAN-network.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.342-350
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• 2009

Currently TMR feed produced in commercial plant is one of the major source to feed cattle for both beef and dairy farm. However, because of lack of cutting and mixing system for utilizing domestic produced firmly baled round roughage in commercial TMR plant, these commercial TMR feed can not satisfy to farmers both in quality and price points of view. In order to solve these problems, a farm group size TMR plant model was developed in this study. The model plant was consist of round bale receiving and cutting system, pneumatic conveying system for transfer the roughage which was cut at the cutter to TMR mixer through pneumatic conveyor, TMR mixer enable to soften the stiff rice strew and to mix with other ingredients, finished feed bin which can be transfer to either packing system or individual farm, packing system by tycon bag which contains 400 kg unit and bulk unloading system to individual farmer. Also, a simulation model ARENA was applied to the model system in order to evaluate and check the production rate in each unit process and operation rate of total system and to find out if there are any clogged unit system obstructing the smooth flow of the total process flow. Processing cycle for produce one batch of the model plant was less than 30 minutes. Thus, it will take less than four hours for producing 16 tons per day equivalent to 1,000 beef cattle's daily feed.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.1317-1327
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• 2016

The baggage handling system (BHS) is one of the most complex system in the airport. A highly economical operating system is required to ensure its performance in consideration of its enormous cost on the extension. Furthermore, the inefficient operation deteriorates not only the system performance but the imbalance among the check-in counters because of a bottleneck on the conveyors downstream. The objective of this research is to improve the performance of both the BHS and the check-in area by efficiently controlling the flow in the merging area on the conveyors. Thus, we suggest a control logic of which the concept is borrowed from data networks. The simulation is used to analyze impacts of the conveyors bottleneck on the check-in area and optimize some parameters used in the suggested logic. We also discuss some observations from the simulation results into several aspects of performance measures.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.31 no.6 s.119
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• pp.514-523
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• 2006

Production of green pepper has been increased due to customer's preference and a projected ten-year boom in the industry in Korea. This study was carried out to develop an automatic grading and sorting system for green pepper using machine vision. The system consisted of a feeding mechanism, segregation section, an image inspection chamber, image processing section, system control section, grading section, and discharging section. Green peppers were separated and transported using a bowl feeder with a vibrator and a belt conveyor, respectively. Images were taken using color CCD cameras and a color frame grabber. An on-line grading algorithm was developed using Visual C/C++. The green peppers could be graded into four classes by activating air nozzles located at the discharging section. Length and curvature of each green pepper were measured while removing a stem of it. The first derivative of thickness profile was used to remove a stem area of segmented image of the pepper. While pepper is moving at 0.45 m/s, the accuracy of grading sorting for large, medium and small pepper are 86.0%, 81.3% and 90.6% respectively. Sorting performance was 121 kg/hour, and about five times better than manual sorting. The developed system was also economically feasible to grade and sort green peppers showing the cost about 40% lower than that of manual operations.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.33-41
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• 2006

This paper presents a method that automatically recognizes products into model type, which it flows with the conveyor belt. The specific interlaced image are occurred by moving image when we use the NTSC based camera. It is impossible to process interlaced images, so a suitable post-processing is required. For the purpose of this processing, after it remove interlaced images using de-interlacing method, it leads rectangle region of object by thresholding. And then, after rectangle region is separated into several blocks through edge detection, we calculate pixel numbers per each block, re-classify using its average, and classify products into model type. Through experiments, we know that the proposed method represent high classification ratio.