• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.12
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• pp.1219-1226
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• 2011

This paper proposes a novel approach to building an occupancy grid map using sonar data. It is very important for a mobile robot to recognize and construct its surrounding environments for navigation. However, the grid map constructed by ultrasonic sensors cannot represent a realistic shape of given environments due to incorrect sonar measurements caused by specular reflection. To overcome this problem, we propose an advanced sonar sensor model which consists of distance and shape factors used to determine the reliability of sensor data. Through this sensor model, a robot can build a high-quality grid map. The proposed method was verified by various experiments and showed that the robot could build an accurate map with sonar data in various indoor environments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.1496-1499
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• 2004

The paper persents an efficient method of extracting line segment in a grid map. The grid map is composed of 2-D grids that have both the occupancy and orientation probabilities based on the simplified Bayesian updating model. The probabilities and orientations of cells in the grid map are continuously updated while the robot explorers to their values. The line segments are, then, extracted from the clusters using Hough transform methods. The eng points of a line segment are evaluated from the cells in each cluster, which is simple and efficient comparing to existing methods. The proposed methods are illustrated by sets of experiments in an indoor environment.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.773-780
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• 2015

Navigation in outdoor environments is a fundamental and challenging problem for unmanned ground vehicles. Detecting lane markings or boundaries on the road may be one of the solutions to make navigation easy. However, because of various environments and road conditions, a robust lane detection is difficult. In this paper, we propose a new approach for estimating virtual lanes on a traversable region. Estimating the virtual lanes consist of two steps: (i) we detect virtual road region through road model selection based on traversability at current frame and similarity between the interframe and (ii) we estimate virtual lane using the number of lane on the road and results of previous frame. To improve the detection performance and reduce the searching region of interests, we use a probability map representing the traversability of the outdoor terrain. In addition, by considering both current and previous frame simultaneously, the proposed method estimate more stable virtual lanes. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach using real data in outdoor environments.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.65-72
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• 2011

In this paper, a real-time monocular vision based navigation system is developed for the disabled people, where online background learning and vector field histogram are used for identifying obstacles and recognizing avoidable paths. The proposed system is performed by three steps: obstacle classification, occupancy grid map generation and VFH-based path recommendation. Firstly, the obstacles are discriminated from images by subtracting with background model which is learned in real time. Thereafter, based on the classification results, an occupancy map sized at $32{\times}24$ is produced, each cell of which represents its own risk by 10 gray levels. Finally, the polar histogram is drawn from the occupancy map, then the sectors corresponding to the valley are chosen as safe paths. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed system, it was tested with a variety of obstacles at indoors and outdoors, then it showed the a'ccuracy of 88%. Moreover, it showed the superior performance when comparing with sensor based navigation systems, which proved the feasibility of the proposed system in using assistive devices of disabled people.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.1411-1422
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• 2003

The detection of free spaces between obstacles in a scene is a prerequisite for navigation of a mobile robot. Especially for stereo vision-based navigation, the problem of correspondence between two images is well known to be of crucial importance. This paper describes multi-range approach of area-based stereo matching for grid mapping and visual navigation in uncertain environment. Camera calibration parameters are optimized by evolutionary algorithm for successful stereo matching. To obtain reliable disparity information from both images, stereo images are to be decomposed into three pairs of images with different resolution based on measurement of disparities. The advantage of multi-range approach is that we can get more reliable disparity in each defined range because disparities from high resolution image are used for farther object a while disparities from low resolution images are used for close objects. The reliable disparity map is combined through post-processing for rejecting incorrect disparity information from each disparity map. The real distance from a disparity image is converted into an occupancy grid representation of a mobile robot. We have investigated the possibility of multi-range approach for the detection of obstacles and visual mapping through various experiments.

• 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.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.487-495
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• 2023

This paper presents a method for autonomous exploration of indoor environments using a 2-dimensional Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) scanner. The proposed frontier-based exploration method considers navigability from the current robot position to extracted frontier targets. An approach to constructing the point cloud grid map that accurately reflects the occupancy probability of glass obstacles is proposed, enabling identification of safe frontier grids on the safety grid map calculated from the point cloud grid map. Navigability, indicating whether the robot can successfully navigate to each frontier target, is calculated by applying the skeletonization-informed rapidly exploring random tree algorithm to the safety grid map. While conventional exploration approaches have focused on frontier detection and target position/direction decision, the proposed method discusses a safe navigation approach for the overall exploration process until the completion of mapping. Real-world experiments have been conducted to verify that the proposed method leads the robot to avoid glass obstacles and safely navigate the entire environment, constructing the point cloud map and calculating the navigability with low computing time deviation.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.8
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• pp.3030-3038
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• 2023

Nowadays, mobile robots have been used to search for uncontrolled radioactive source in indoor environments to avoid radiation exposure for technicians. However, in the indoor environments, especially in the presence of obstacles, how to make the robots with limited sensing capabilities automatically search for the radioactive source remains a major challenge. Also, the source search efficiency of robots needs to be further improved to meet practical scenarios such as limited exploration time. This paper proposes an automatic source search strategy, abbreviated as ACA: the location of source is estimated by a convolutional neural network (CNN), and the path is planned by the A-star algorithm. First, the search area is represented as an occupancy grid map. Then, the radiation dose distribution of the radioactive source in the occupancy grid map is obtained by Monte Carlo (MC) method simulation, and multiple sets of radiation data are collected through the eight neighborhood self-avoiding random walk (ENSAW) algorithm as the radiation data set. Further, the radiation data set is fed into the designed CNN architecture to train the network model in advance. When the searcher enters the search area where the radioactive source exists, the location of source is estimated by the network model and the search path is planned by the A-star algorithm, and this process is iterated continuously until the searcher reaches the location of radioactive source. The experimental results show that the average number of radiometric measurements and the average number of moving steps of the ACA algorithm are only 2.1% and 33.2% of those of the gradient search (GS) algorithm in the indoor environment without obstacles. In the indoor environment shielded by concrete walls, the GS algorithm fails to search for the source, while the ACA algorithm successfully searches for the source with fewer moving steps and sparse radiometric data.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.8
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• pp.1605-1614
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• 2009

The technique of simultaneous localization and mapping is the most important research topic in mobile robotics. In the process of building a map in its available memory, the robot memorizes environmental information on the plane of grid or topology. Several approaches about this technique have been presented so far, but most of them use mapping technique as either grid-based map or topology-based map. In this paper we propose a frame of solving the SLAM problem of linking map covering, map building, localizing, path finding and obstacle avoiding in an automatic way. Some algorithms integrating grid and topology map are considered and this make the SLAM performance faster and more stable. The proposed scheme uses an occupancy grid map in representing the environment and then formulate topological information in path finding by A${\ast}$ algorithm. The mapping process is shown and the shortest path is decided on grid based map. Then topological information such as direction, distance is calculated on simulator program then transmitted to robot hardware devices. The localization process and the dynamic obstacle avoidance can be accomplished by topological information on grid map. While mapping and moving, pose of the robot is adjusted for correct localization by implementing additional pixel based image layer and tracking some features. A laser range finer and electronic compass systems are implemented on the mobile robot and DC geared motor wheels are individually controlled by the adaptive PD control method. Simulations and experimental results show its performance and efficiency of the proposed scheme are increased.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2003.06a
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• pp.176-180
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• 2003

The paper presents an efficient method of extracting line segment in a local map of a robot's surroundings. The local map is composed of 2-D grids that have both the occupancy and orientation probabilities using sonar sensors. To find the shape of an object in a local map from orientation information, the orientations are clustered into several groups according to their values. The line segment is , then, extracted from the clusters based on Hough transform. The proposed technique is illustrated by experiments in an indoor environment.