• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.662-671
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• 2009

In this paper, a robot was developed for in-pipe cleaning and inspecting a large number of circular in-pipes of sea plants, ships, and buildings. A pressure generation mechanism was devised to inspect circular in-pipes with different diameters and to move up and down slant or perpendicular slopes in-pipes. For inspection of the dark inner side of the pipe, a light system using LED which dissipats small electricity was developed. Also, a design method was analyzed to decide the capacity of driving motor for the robot when the mass and maximum velocity of the robot are identified. The robot developed based on the design specification, was tested to verify the performance of the pressure generation mechanism. In addition, a control system was developed for the test.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.58-65
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• 2021

Most pipe-inspection robots have fixed sizes and use a wired cable system. Pipelines are generally composed of various structures, including bent pipes, vertical pipes, branch pipes, and holes, and it is difficult to explore the insides of such modular piping structures. In an offshore plant pipeline, a robot that can pass through the pipe hole in the downward direction or avoid obstacles, such as a measuring instruments, has not been introduced yet. In this study, an inspection robot that can travel through most pipelines in offshore plants is proposed. This robot uses mecanum wheels; upward, downward, and rotary motion; and a novel rotatable mechanism. Moreover, the robot is designed to be compact and lightweight to include additional devices in the middle.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.74-79
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• 2020

Safety inspection of cable-supported bridge has increasingly attention as many cable-supported bridges are currently constructed/operated. Whilst cables as a main component in cable-supported bridge should be inspected regularly, traditional method (visual inspection) has limitation to check the condition of cables properly due to restricted factors. It is evidently necessary to develop cable-inspection robot to overcome this concern. In this respect, the main aim in this study is to manufacture the improved robot compared with the existing robot. The improved functions of the robot in this study were that the robot can be operated in large cable diameter (greater than 200 mm) and climbing ability of the robot increases. In addition, electro-magnetic sensor as a non-destructive method in the robot was added to detect damaged cables and performance of the sensor was evaluated in indoor and field experiments. Consequently, the robot was able to move on the cable with ~0.2m/s and to detect damaged cables using the sensor. It was also confirmed that performance of the robot in field test is similar to that in indoor test.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2011.07a
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• pp.1780-1781
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• 2011

There have been numerous studies on application of robots to in-pipe inspection system. In this thesis, a mobile robot that can move through elbows and vertical pipes having diameter 100mm is developed. Defect detection technology for locating wall-thinnings, corrosions and foreign materials is developed for high temperature and pressure pipings in thermal power plants, utilizing laser sensors installed on the robot. Actual defect detection performance is evaluated with application of the developed robot system to a mock-up pipings.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.1327-1330
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• 2004

An underwater robotic system has been developed and applied to visual inspection of reactor vessel internals. The Korea Electric Power Robot for Visual Test (KeproVt) consists of an underwater robot, a vision processor-based measuring unit, a master control station and a servo control station. The robot guided by the control station with the measuring unit can be controlled to have any motion at any position in the reactor vessel with $\pm$1 cm positioning and $\pm$2 degrees heading accuracies with enough precision to inspect reactor internals. A simple and fast installation process is emphasized in the developed system. The developed robotic system was successfully deployed at the Younggwang Nuclear Unit 1 for the visual inspection of reactor internals.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.1720-1721
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• 2007

This paper presents a Fuzzy+PID control method for a Bridge Inspection Robot(BIR) system. The BIR has been developed with the aim of checking the safety status of a real bridge, gathering accurate data and performing maintenance. The developed robot system is composed of the specially designed car for bridge inspection, the guide rail and the inspection robot. The proposed Fuzzy+PID controllers are used to track speed reference signal of X axis and position reference signal of Z axis. Experimental results verify that the proposed Fuzz+PID control design method can achieve favorable control performance with regard to external disturbance.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.169-175
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• 2009

A new wire detection algorithm for power line inspection by a mobile robot has been proposed in this paper. There have been a lot of studies in order to support the high-quality electric power. For the high-quality power supply, it is necessary to investigate the power lines and insulators before the lines or insulators were disconnected or damaged. Although Korea Electric power Corp. has made many efforts for the quality improvement, it is not enough to inspect all the power lines by human inspectors. According to this problem, it is decided to replace the human operators by the power line inspection robot. When the robots are used for the inspection, there could be several advantages, for example, the working efficiency and the prevention of accident. And also the shortage of human power for dangerous jobs can be resolved. In this paper, as a part of the development of power line inspection robot, DICRO, the sensor fusion and fuzzy control algorithms are developed to detect the wire and slope of the wire. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is proved by the real experiments with DICRO which is under development so far.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.26 no.12
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• pp.2598-2604
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• 2002

Robots that can move along the narrow and rough tube are very important as the request for the inspection increases. It is necessary for the inspection robots to have a capability to move successfully at even overturned situation and have a simple mechanism to reduce the unexpected failure possibility fer the successful completion of the given mission. Through this paper, the authors propose a novel and simple mechanism using a combination cam device to generate the locomotive motion of multi-legs. This robot uses one DC motor and one combination cam shaft to generate the locomotive motion and can move rough tubes without failure even at the overturned situation. The robot also shows enough fragging force fer the connected line that is very important for a wired inspection robot. Kinematics analysis to design the specification of the robot will be followed and several applications show this robot's potential capabilities.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.477-478
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• 2008

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.144-149
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• 2019

This paper describes the results of a study on the unmanned maintenance robot that simultaneously performs the cleaning and inspection of the photovoltaic panels. The robot has a special adsorptive device, an infrared sensor, a vacuum level sensor and a camera. The robot uses two SSC (Sliding Suction Cup) adsorptive devices to move up and down the slope. First, the forces generated when the robot moves up the slope are mechanically analyzed, and the required design and control of the adsorption system are suggested. The robot was designed and manufactured to operate stably by using the presented results. Next, the normal force between the panel and the wheel was measured to confirm that the robot was manufactured and operated as intended, and the robot motion was tested on the inclined panel. It has been proven that robots are well designed and built to clean and inspect sloped panels.