• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.75-84
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• 2023

Ships need to ensure safety during their navigation, which makes route determination highly important. It must be accompanied by a route following controller that can accurately follow the route. This study proposes a method for automatically generating the ship route based on deep reinforcement learning algorithm and following it using a route following controller. To generate a ship route, under keel clearance was applied to secure the ship's safety and navigation chart information was used to apply ship navigation related regulations. For the experiment, a target ship with a draft of 8.23 m was designated. The target route in this study was to depart from Busan port and arrive at the pilot boarding place of the Ulsan port. As a route following controller, a velocity type fuzzy P ID controller that could compensate for the limitation of a linear controller was applied. As a result of using the deep Q network, a route with a total distance of 62.22 km and 81 waypoints was generated. To simplify the route, the Douglas-Peucker algorithm was introduced to reduce the total distance to 55.67 m and the number of way points to 3. After that, an experiment was conducted to follow the path generated by the target ship. Experiment results revealed that the velocity type fuzzy P ID controller had less overshoot and fast settling time. In addition, it had the advantage of reducing the energy loss of the ship because the change in rudder angle was smooth. This study can be used as a basic study of route automatic generation. It suggests a method of combining ship route generation with the route following control.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.49-56
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• 2023

As interest in autonomous ships continues to grow, researchers around the world are dedicating themselves to the development of relevant technologies. However, these technologies are not yet perfect. Several technical problems remain unresolved. To address these problems, this study presents the implementation of a ship trajectory algorithm for group navigation, where followers can navigate by following the trajectory of a leader. The algorithm works by storing the leader's trajectory as a follow-point and by calculating the azimuth using the line-of-sight guidance law to reach it. A course-keeping controller based on PD control is implemented to follow the target course and a speed control algorithm is designed to prevent collisions. Sea experiments were conducted using 1 m class small RC model boats to verify the proposed algorithm. The follower successfully navigated by following the leader's trajectory and maintained the designated distance to the forward boat. This study is significant in that it implements an algorithm for the follower to follow the trajectory of the leader rather than directly following it as in conventional methods, and verifies it through sea experiments.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.2142-2148
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• 2015

This paper proposes novel real-time footstep planning and following methods for the navigation of humanoid robots. A footstep command is defined by a walking direction and step lengths for footstep planning. The walking direction is determined by a uni-vector field navigation method, and the allowable yawing range caused by hardware limitation is considered. The lateral step length is determined to avoid collisions between the two legs while walking. The sagittal step length is modified by a binary search algorithm when collision occurs between the robot body and obstacles in a narrow space. If the robot body still collides with obstacles despite the modification of the sagittal step length, the lateral step length is shifted at the next footstep. For footstep following, a walking pattern generator based on a 3-D linear inverted pendulum model is utilized, which can generate modifiable walking patterns using the zero-moment point variation scheme. Therefore, it enables a humanoid robot to follow the footstep command planned for each footstep. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through simulation and experiment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• 2018.11a
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• pp.256-257
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• 2018

This paper deals with the path-following control for marine surface vehicles with underactuated characteristics. In consideration of practical limitations of actuators, an improved DVS(dynamic virtual ship) guidance algorithm is proposed with the multi-level DVS optionally selected to be tracked. To address the output-feedback control issue, an adaptive FLS(fuzzy logical systems) is devised to online approximate the kinematic states. Based on that observing framework, the path-following control law is thereafter derived. Simulations testify effectiveness of the proposed scheme

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2011

An increasing number of researches and developments for personal or professional service robots are attracting a lot of attention and interest industrially and academically during the past decade. Furthermore, the development of intelligent robots is intensively fostered as strategic industry. Until now, most of practical and commercial service robots are worked by remotely operated controller. The most important technical issue of remote control is a wireless communication, especially in the indoor and unstructured environments where communication infrastructures might be destroyed by various disasters. Therefore we propose a multi-robot following navigation method for securing the valid communication distance extension of the remote control based on WPAN(Wireless Personal Area Networks). The concept and implementation of following navigation are introduced and the performance verification is performed through real navigation experiments in real or test-bed environments.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.1097-1107
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• 2001

In this paper, the wall following navigation algorithm of the mobile robot using a mono vision system is described. The key points of the mobile robot navigation system are effective acquisition of the environmental information and fast recognition of the robot position. Also, from this information, the mobile robot should be appropriately controlled to follow a desired path. For the recognition of the relative position and orientation of the robot to the wall, the features of the corridor structure are extracted using the mono vision system, then the relative position, the offset distance and steering angle of the robot from the wall, is derived for a simple corridor geometry. For the alleviation of the computation burden of the image processing, the Kalman filter is used to reduce search region in the image space for line detection. Next, the robot is controlled by this information to follow the desired path. The wall following control scheme by the PD control scheme is composed of two control parts, the approaching control and the orientation control, and each control is performed by steering and forward-driving motion of the robot. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the real time navigation experiments are performed. Through the result of the experiments, the effectiveness and flexibility of the suggested algorithm are verified in comparison with a pure encoder-guided mobile robot navigation system.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.6 no.7
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• pp.586-593
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• 2000

In this paper we propose a new approach to the autonomous wall-following of wheeled mobile robots using hybrid system reference motion synthesis and generation. The hybrid system approach is in-troduced to the motion control of nonholonomic mobile robots for the indoor navigation problems. In the dis-crete event system the discrete states are defined by the user-defined constraints and the reference mo-tion commands are specified in the abstracted motions. The hybrid control system applied for the non-holonomic mobile robots can combine the motion planning and autonomous navigation with obstacle avoid-ance for the indoor navigation problem. Simulation results show that hybrid system approach is an effective method for the autonomous navigation in indoor environments.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.246-257
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• 2010

Autonomous guided robot navigation which consists of following unknown paths and avoiding unknown obstacles has been a fundamental technique for unmanned robots in outdoor environments. The unknown path following requires techniques such as path recognition, path planning, and robot pose estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel sensor fusion system for autonomous guided robot navigation in outdoor environments. The proposed system consists of three monocular cameras and an array of nine infrared range sensors. The two cameras equipped on the robot's right and left sides are used to recognize unknown paths and estimate relative robot pose on these paths through bayesian sensor fusion method, and the other camera equipped at the front of the robot is used to recognize abrupt curves and unknown obstacles. The infrared range sensor array is used to improve the robustness of obstacle avoidance. The forward camera and the infrared range sensor array are fused through rule-based method for obstacle avoidance. Experiments in outdoor environments show the mobile robot with the proposed sensor fusion system performed successfully real-time autonomous guided navigation.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.387-400
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• 2015

A fuzzy logic based mobile robot navigation system was developed to improve the driving ability without trapping inside obstacles in complex terrains, which is one of the most concerns in robot navigation in unknown terrains. The navigation system utilizes the data from ultrasonic sensors to recognize the distances from obstacles and the position information from a GPS sensor. The fuzzy navigation system has two groups of behavior rules, and the robot chooses one of them based on the information from sensors while navigating for the targets. In plain terrains the robot with the proposed algorithm uses one rule group consisting of behavior rules for avoiding obstacle, target steering, and following edge of obstacle. Once trap is detected the robot uses the other rule group consisting of behavior rules strengthened for following edge of obstacle. The output signals from navigation system control the speed of two wheels of the robot through the fuzzy logic data process. The test was conducted in the Matlab based mobile robot simulator developed in this study, and the results show that escaping ability from obstacle is improved.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.40 no.11
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• pp.979-987
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• 2012

This paper implements and integrates algorithms for terrain following of UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles): trajectory generation, guidance, and navigation. Terrain following is very important for UCAVs because they perform very dangerous missions such as Suppression of Enemy Air Defences while the terrain following can improve the survivability of UCAVs against from the air defence systems of the enemy. To deal with the GPS jamming, terrain referenced navigation based on nonlinear filter is chosen. For the trajectory generation, Voronoi diagram is adopted to generate horizontal plane path to avoid the air defense system. Cubic spline method is used to generate vertical plane path to prevent collisions with ground while flying sufficiently close to surface. Follow-the-Carrot and pure pursuit tracking methods, which are look-ahead point based guidance algorithms, are applied for the guidance. Numerical simulation is performed to verify the performance of the integrated terrain following algorithm.