• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.197-209
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• 2011

This paper presents a localization system using ceiling images in a large indoor environment. For a system with low cost and complexity, we propose a single camera based system that utilizes ceiling images acquired from a camera installed to point upwards. For reliable operation, we propose a method using hybrid features which include natural landmarks in a natural scene and artificial landmarks observable in an infrared ray domain. Compared with previous works utilizing only infrared based features, our method reduces the required number of artificial features as we exploit both natural and artificial features. In addition, compared with previous works using only natural scene, our method has an advantage in the convergence speed and robustness as an observation of an artificial feature provides a crucial clue for robot pose estimation. In an experiment with challenging situations in a real environment, our method was performed impressively in terms of the robustness and accuracy. To our knowledge, our method is the first ceiling vision based localization method using features from both visible and infrared rays domains. Our system can be easily utilized with a variety of service robot applications in a large indoor environment.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1134-1139
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• 2003

Tracking is a fundamental technique which is able to be applied to gesture recognition, visual surveillance, tangible agent and so forth. Especially, multiple object tracking has been extensively studied in recent years in order to perform many and more complicated tasks. In this paper, we propose a new approach of multiple object tracking which is based on discrete event. We call this system the DEMOT (Discrete Event based Multiple Object Tracking). This approach is based on the fact that a multiple object tracking can have just four situations - initiation, continuation, termination, and overlapping. Here, initiation, continuation, termination, and overlapping constitute a primary event set and this is based on the change of the number of extracted objects between a previous frame and a current frame. This system reduces computational costs and holds down the identity of all targets. We make experiments for this system with respect to the number of targets, each event, and processing period. We describe experimental results that show the successful multiple object tracking by using our approach.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1559-1564
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• 2003

In this paper, a control method is presented to improve performance of haptic display on a passive haptic device equipped with passive actuators. In displaying a virtual wall with the passive haptic device, an unstable behavior occurs with excessive actions of brakes due to the time delay mainly arising from the update rate of the virtual environment and force approximation originated from the characteristics of the passive actuators. The previous T.D.P.C. (Time Domain Passivity Control) method was not suitable for the passive haptic device, since a programmable damper used in the previously introduced T.D.P.C. method easily leads to undesirable behaviors. A new passivity control method is evaluated with considering characteristics of the passive device. First, we propose a control method which is designed under the analysis of the passive FME (Force Manipulability Ellipsoid). And then a passivity control scheme is applied to the proposed control method. Various experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed method with a 2-link mechanism.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1921-1926
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• 2003

We build a local minimum free motion planning for mobile robots considering dynamic environments by simple sensor fusion assuming that there are unknown obstacles which can be detected only partially at a time by proximity sensors and can be cleaned up or moved slowly (dynamic environments). Potential field is used as a basic platform for the motion planning. To clear local minimum problem, the partial information on the obstacles should be memorized and integrated effectively. Sets of linked line segments (SLLS) are proposed as the integration method. Then robot's target point is replaced by virtual target considering the integrated sensing information. As for the main proximity sensors, we use laser slit emission and simple web camera since the system gives more continuous data information. Also, we use ultrasonic sensors as the auxiliary sensors for simple sensor fusion considering the advantages in that they give exact information about the presence of any obstacle within certain range. By using this sensor fusion, the dynamic environments can be dealt easily. The performance of our algorithm is validated via simulations and experiments.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.461-468
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• 2005

This paper proposes a wheel-assembly automation system, which assembles a wheel into a hub of a vehicle hung to a moving hanger in a car manufacturing line. A macro-micro manipulator control strategy is introduced to increase the system bandwidth and tracking accuracy to ensure insertion tolerance. A camera is equipped at the newly designed wheel gripper, which is attached at the center of the end-effector of the macro-micro manipulator and is used to measure position error of the hub of the vehicle in real time. The redundancy problem in the macro-micro manipulator is solved without complicated calculation by assigning proper functions to each part so that the macro part tracks the velocity error while the micro part regulates the fine position error. Experimental results indicate that tracking error satisfies the insertion tolerance of assembly $({\pm}1mm)$, and thus it is verified that the proposed system can be applied to the wheel assembly task on a moving hanger in the manufacturing line.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.37-42
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• 2005

This paper presents an autonomous system for reconstruction of three-dimensional indoor environments using a mobile robot. The system is composed of a mobile robot, a three-dimensional scanning system, and a notebook computer for registration, observation planning and real-time three-dimensional data transferring. Three-dimensional scanning system obtains three-dimensional environmental data and performs filtering of dynamic objects. Then, it registers multiple three-dimensional scans into one coordinate system and performs observation planning which finds the next scanning position by using the layered hexahedral-map and topological-map. Then, the mobile robot moves to the next scanning position, and repeats all procedures until there is no scanning tree in topological-map. In concurrence with data scanning, three-dimensional data can be transferred through wireless-LAN in real-time. This system is experimented successfully by using a mobile robot named KARA.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.1668-1672
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• 2005

This paper presents the wall following control of a small indoor airship (blimp). The purpose of the wall following control is that a blimp maintains its position and pose and flies along the wall. A blimp has great inertia and it is affected by temperature, atmospheric pressure, disturbance and air flow around blimp. In order to fly indoors, a volume of blimp should be small. The volume of a blimp becomes small then the buoyancy of a blimp should be smaller. Therefore, it is difficult to attach additional equipments on the blimp which are necessary to control blimp. For these reasons, it is difficult to control the pose and position of the blimp during the wall following. In our research, to cope with its defects, we developed new blimp. Generally, a blimp is controlled by using rudders and elevators, however our developed blimp has no rudders and elevators, and it has faster responses than general blimps. Our developed blimp is designed to smoothly follow the wall by using low-cost small ultra sonic sensors instead of high-cost sensors. Finally, the controller is designed to robustly control the pose and position of the blimp which could control in spite of arbitrary disturbance during the wall following, and the effectiveness of the controller is verified by experiment.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.2237-2242
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• 2005

The original RRT is iteratively expanded by applying control inputs that drive the system slightly toward randomly-selected states, as opposed to requiring point-to-point convergence, as in the probabilistic roadmap approach. It is generally known that the performance of RRTs can be improved depending on the selection of the metrics in choosing the nearest vertex and bias techniques in choosing random states. We designed a path planning algorithm based on the RRT method for a remote-controlled mobile robot. First, we considered a bias technique that is goal-biased Gaussian random distribution along the command directions. Secondly, we selected the metric based on a weighted Euclidean distance of random states and a weighted distance from the goal region. It can save the effort to explore the unnecessary regions and help the mobile robot to find a feasible trajectory as fast as possible. Finally, the constraints of the actuator should be considered to apply the algorithm to physical mobile robots, so we select control inputs distributed with commanded inputs and constrained by the maximum rate of input change instead of random inputs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is significantly more efficient for planning than a basic RRT planner. It reduces the computational time needed to find a feasible trajectory and can be practically implemented in a remote-controlled mobile robot.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.257-261
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• 2003

In this study, we investigated the modeling and design of an Intelligent Agent System (IAS). To achieve this goal, we introduced several kinds of agents that exhibit intelligent features. These are the main agent, management agent, watcher agent, report agent and application agent. We applied the intelligent agent concept to two different application fields, i.e. the intelligent agent system for pattern classification and the intelligent agent system for bank asset management modeling.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2006.07d
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• pp.1929-1930
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• 2006

Human like robot arm posture for grasping by considering the shape of the target object is quite a challenge in the field of robotics. In this paper, an optimized grasp posture with respect to the shape of the object considering the wrist joint angle and elbow elevation angle, in order to verify that the grasp posture is human like has been proposed. Given a target object, the candidates for grasp are computed by the method described in this paper. For each candidate, the closed loop inverse kinematics has been solved for the corresponding hand position and orientation. From the obtained joint angles through inverse kinematics, the elbow elevation angle has been computed and compared with the elbow elevation angle obtained through human movement data by the characteristic equation. After considering all the candidates, the hand position and orientation with minimum wrist joint and difference in elbow elevation angles has been utilized as the optimized grasp posture. Simulation results are presented.