• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.96-103
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• 2014

Global localization is one of the essential issues for mobile robot navigation. In this study, an indoor global localization method is proposed which uses a Kinect sensor and a monocular upward-looking camera. The proposed method generates an environment map which consists of a grid map, a ceiling feature map from the upward-looking camera, and a spatial feature map obtained from the Kinect sensor. The method selects robot pose candidates using the spatial feature map and updates sample poses by particle filter based on the grid map. Localization success is determined by calculating the matching error from the ceiling feature map. In various experiments, the proposed method achieved a position accuracy of 0.12m and a position update speed of 10.4s, which is robust enough for real-world applications.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.170-177
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• 2014

This paper proposes a novel upward-looking camera-based global localization using a ceiling image map. The ceiling images obtained through the SLAM process are integrated into the ceiling image map using a particle filter. Global localization is performed by matching the ceiling image map with the current ceiling image using SURF keypoint correspondences. The robot pose is then estimated by the coordinate transformation from the ceiling image map to the global coordinate system. A series of experiments show that the proposed method is robust in real environments.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.203-209
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• 2010

This paper presents a hierarchical fuzzy motion planner for humanoid robots in 3D uneven environments. First, we define both motion primitives and locomotion primitives of humanoid robots. A high-level planner finds a global path from a global navigation map that is generated based on a combination of 2.5 dimensional maps of the workspace. We use a passage map, an obstacle map and a gradient map of obstacles to distinguish obstacles. A mid-level planner creates subgoals that help the robot efficiently cope with various obstacles using only a small set of locomotion primitives that are useful for stable navigation of the robot. We use a local obstacle map to find the subgoals along the global path. A low-level planner searches for an optimal sequence of locomotion primitives between subgoals by using fuzzy motion planning. We verify our approach on a virtual humanoid robot in a simulated environment. Simulation results show a reduction in planning time and the feasibility of the proposed method.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.483-488
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• 2008

An active omni-directional raging system using an omni-directional vision with structured light has many advantages compared to the conventional ranging systems: robustness against external illumination noise because of the laser structured light and computational efficiency because of one shot image containing $360^{\circ}$ environment information from the omni-directional vision. The omni-directional range data represents a local distance map at a certain position in the workspace. In this paper, we propose a matching algorithm for the local distance map with the given global map database, thereby to localize a mobile robot in the global workspace. Since the global map database consists of line segments representing edges of environment object in general, the matching algorithm is based on relative position and orientation of line segments in the local map and the global map. The effectiveness of the proposed omni-directional ranging system and the matching are verified through experiments.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.137-143
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• 2005

Autonomous mobile robot has an ability to navigate using both map in known environment and sensors for detecting obstacles in unknown environment. In general, autonomous mobile robot navigates by global path planning on the basis of already made map and local path planning on the basis of various kinds of sensors to avoid abrupt obstacles. This paper provides a global path planning method using self-organizing feature map which is a method among a number of neural network. The self-organizing feature map uses a randomized small valued initial weight vectors, selects the neuron whose weight vector best matches input as the winning neuron, and trains the weight vectors such that neurons within the activity bubble are move toward the input vector. On the other hand, the modified method in this research uses a predetermined initial weight vectors, gives the systematic input vector whose position best matches obstacles, and trains the weight vectors such that neurons within the activity bubble are move toward the input vector. According to simulation results one can conclude that the modified neural network is useful tool for the global path planning problem of a mobile robot.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.127-134
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• 2020

In this paper, we propose a map alignment method for maps generated by point-line monocular SLAM. In the proposed method, the information of feature lines as well as feature points extracted from multiple maps are fused into a single map. To this end, the proposed method first searches for similar areas between maps via Bag-of-Words-based image matching. Thereafter, it calculates the similarity transformation between the maps in the corresponding areas to align the maps. Finally, we merge the overlapped information of multiple maps into a single map by removing duplicate information from similar areas. Experimental results show that maps created by different users are combined into a single map, and the accuracy of the fused map is similar with the one generated by a single user. We expect that the proposed method can be utilized for fast imagery map generation.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.23 no.3 s.180
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• pp.94-101
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• 2006

A global path planning method using self-organizing feature map which is a method among a number of neural network is presented. The self-organizing feature map uses a randomized small valued initial weight vectors, selects the neuron whose weight vector best matches input as the winning neuron, and trains the weight vectors such that neurons within the activity bubble are moved toward the input vector On the other hand, the modified method in this research uses a predetermined initial weight vectors of 1-dimensional string and 2-dimensional mesh, gives the systematic input vector whose position best matches obstacles, and trains the weight vectors such that neurons within the activity bubble are moved toward the input vector. According to simulation results one can conclude that the modified neural network is useful tool for the global path planning problem of a mobile robot.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.417-423
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• 2019

This paper presents an evaluation system to determine the completeness of a space map obtained by a visual SLAM(Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithm. The proposed system consists of three parts. First, the proposed system detects the occurrence of loop closing to confirm that users acquired the information from all directions. Thereafter, the acquired map is divided with regular intervals and is verified whether each area has enough map points to successfully estimate users' position. Finally, to check the effectiveness of each map point, the system checks whether the map points are identifiable even at the location where there is a large distance difference from the acquisition position. Experimental results show that space maps whose completeness is proven by the proposed system has higher stability and accuracy in terms of position estimation than other maps that are not proven.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.33-41
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• 2008

Based on object recognition technology, we present a new global localization method for robot navigation. For doing this, we model any indoor environment using the following visual cues with a stereo camera; view-based image features for object recognition and those 3D positions for object pose estimation. Also, we use the depth information at the horizontal centerline in image where optical axis passes through, which is similar to the data of the 2D laser range finder. Therefore, we can build a hybrid local node for a topological map that is composed of an indoor environment metric map and an object location map. Based on such modeling, we suggest a coarse-to-fine strategy for estimating the global localization of a mobile robot. The coarse pose is obtained by means of object recognition and SVD based least-squares fitting, and then its refined pose is estimated with a particle filtering algorithm. With real experiments, we show that the proposed method can be an effective vision- based global localization algorithm.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.693-699
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• 2006

An accurate and compact map is essential to an autonomous mobile robot system. For navigation, it is efficient to use an occupancy grid map because the environment is represented by probability distribution. But it is difficult to apply it to the large environment since it needs a large amount of memory proportional to the environment size. As an alternative, a topological map can be used to represent it in terms of the discrete nodes with edges connecting them. It is usually constructed by the Voronoi-like graphs, but in this paper the topological map is incrementally built based on the local grid map using the thinning algorithm. This algorithm can extract only meaningful topological information by using the C-obstacle concept in real-time and is robust to the environment change, because its underlying local grid map is constructed based on the Bayesian update formula. In this paper, the position probability is defined to evaluate the quantitative reliability of the end nodes of this thinning-based topological map (TTM). The global TTM can be constructed by merging each local TTM by matching the reliable end nodes determined by the position probability. It is shown that the proposed TTM can represent the environment accurately in real-time and it is readily extended to the global TTM.