• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 2000.07d
• /
• pp.2840-2842
• /
• 2000

This paper describes sensor-based occupancy grid map construction method through complete coverage navigation algorithm in unknown environment. In this paper, we use the updated Baysian model for probabilistic grid map. For map construction, complete coverage navigation method in which mobile robot can navigate complete field through as short path as possible in unknown environment, is used. The computer simulations result show that map construction method using complete coverage algorithm is efficient.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.79-85
• /
• 2018

This study focuses on autonomous exploration based on map expansion for an underwater robot equipped with acoustic sonars. Map expansion is applicable to large-area mapping, but it may affect localization accuracy. Thus, as the key contribution of this paper, we propose a method for underwater autonomous exploration wherein the robot determines the trade-off between map expansion ratio and position accuracy, selects which of the two has higher priority, and then moves to a mission step. An occupancy grid map is synthesized by utilizing the measurements of an acoustic range sonar that determines the probability of occupancy. This information is then used to determine a path to the frontier, which becomes the new search point. During area searching and map building, the robot revisits artificial landmarks to improve its position accuracy as based on imaging sonar-based recognition and EKF-SLAM if the position accuracy is above the predetermined threshold. Additionally, real-time experiments were conducted by using an underwater robot, yShark, to validate the proposed method, and the analysis of the results is discussed herein.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
• /
• v.11 no.2
• /
• pp.679-687
• /
• 2019

This paper presents the autonomous swimming technology developed for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) operating in the underwater jacket structure environment. To prevent the position divergence of the inertial navigation system constructed for the primary navigation solution for the vehicle, we've developed kinds of marker-recognition based underwater localization methods using both of optical and acoustic cameras. However, these two methods all require the artificial markers to be located near to the cameras mounted on the vehicle. Therefore, in the case of the vehicle far away from the structure where the markers are usually mounted on, we may need alternative position-aiding solution to guarantee the navigation accuracy. For this purpose, we develop a sonar image processing based underwater localization method using a Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) mounted in front of the vehicle. The primary purpose of this FLS is to detect the obstacles in front of the vehicle. According to the detected obstacle(s), we apply an Occupancy Grid Map (OGM) based path planning algorithm to derive an obstacle collision-free reference path. Experimental studies are carried out in the water tank and also in the Pohang Yeongilman port sea environment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed autonomous swimming technology.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
• /
• 2009.11a
• /
• pp.381-382
• /
• 2009

본 논문은 고령자 및 장애인의 안전한 이동을 지원하기 위한 지능형 휠체어에서의 자동 장애물 감지 및 회피 기술을 개발한다. 이때 다양한 환경에서의 장애물을 정확히 감지하고 회피하기 위하여 학습을 이용한 비전 기반의 경로 선정 방법이 제안 된다. 제안된 시스템은 배경 분류기, occupancy grid map 생성기, 경로 선정기로 구성되며, 경로 선정 시 강건한 장애물 검출을 수행하기 위해 입력 영상을 occupancy grid map으로 변환하고, K-means clustering 알고리즘을 이용하여 생성된 대표 템플릿들과 비교하여 이동 가능한 방향을 선정한다. 제안된 시스템의 효율성을 증명하기 위해 다양한 형태의 장애물을 포함하는 실내 및 실외에서 실험한 결과 81.7%의 정확도를 보였으며, 지능형 휠체어 사용자에게 안전한 이동성을 제공 할 수 있음을 증명 하였다.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.30-38
• /
• 2014

The purpose of this study is to build and manage environment models with line segments from sonar range data on obstacles in unknown and varied environments. The proposed method therefore employs a two-stage data-transform process in order to extract environmental line segments from range data on obstacles. In the first stage, the occupancy grid extracted from the range data is accumulated to form a two-dimensional local histogram grid. In the second stage, a line histogram extracted from a local histogram grid is based on a Hough transform, and matching serves as a means of comparing each of the segments on a global line segments map against the line segments to detect the degree of similarity in the overlap, orientation, and arrangement. Each of these tests is formulated by comparing one of the parameters in the segment representation. After the tests, new line segments can be found at maximum-density cells in the line histogram, and they are composed onto the global line segment map. The proposed technique is demonstrated in experiments in an indoor environment.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.7 no.9
• /
• pp.783-789
• /
• 2001

The purpose of this study is to build and to manage environment models with line segments from the sonar range data on obstacles in unknown and varied environments. The proposed method subsequently employs a two-stage data-transform process in order to extract environmental line segments from the range data on obstacles. In the first stage, the occupancy grid extracted from the range data is accumulated to a two-dimensional local histogram grid. In the second stage, a line histogram extracted from an local histogram gird is based on a Hough transform, and matching is a process of comparing each of the segments in the global line segments map against the line segments to detect similarity in overlap, orientation, and arrangement. Each of these tests is made by comparing one of the parameters in the segment representation. After the tests, new line segments are composed to the global line segments map. The proposed technique is illustrated by experiments in an indoor environment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
• /
• 2010.06c
• /
• pp.358-363
• /
• 2010

본 논문은 가정용 청소로봇이 대중화가 이루어지면서 많은 종류의 청소로봇들이 개발되고 있지만 대부분의 청소로봇들이 외부 환경과 상호적으로 대응하지 못하고 무작위 경로 생성에 가까운 알고리즘들을 적용하고 있는 점에서 착안하였다. 목표로 하고 있는 경로 탐색 기법은 대부분의 가정용 청소로봇이 장착하고 있는 범퍼 센서를 사용하여 논리적인 가상의 지도를 생성하고 이 정보를 활용하여 청소로봇의 위치를 파악하고 최적의 청소 경로를 생성하는 방법이다. 사람이 진공청소기를 사용하여 청소를 하듯이 청소할 공간을 파악하고 일련의 규칙대로 청소하는 무의식의 프로세스를 청소로봇이 최대한 유사하게 작동하기 위해서는 벽뿐만 아니라 소파나 테이블과 같은 로봇의 움직임을 방해하는 각종 요소들을 모두 고려해야 한다. 그러므로 본 논문에서는 Occupancy Grid Map을 생성하여 로봇이 장애물의 위치를 파악하고 청소 경로를 탐색할 수 있도록 한다. 그리고 이러한 경로 탐색 기법을 적용하기 위해서 Monte-Carlo Localization 알고리즘을 사용하며 생성된 Occupancy Grid Map을 통하여 로봇이 자체적으로 위치를 파악할 수 있도록 한다. 청소로봇이 자체의 위치를 파악하게 되면 로봇의 크기와 비교하여 움직일 수 있는 공간과 움직이지 못하는 공간을 구별하여 이동 가능한 영역과는 별개로 청소를 위한 경로 탐색을 수행할 수 있다. 청소를 목적으로 하는 경로 탐색은 청소 영역을 최대화하면서 최적의 경로를 탐색하고 Localization을 통해 해당 경로를 유지하면서 이동할 수 있게 된다. 이러한 경로 탐색 기법을 제시하면서 기존의 청소로봇들과의 알고리즘 차원에서의 비교 및 그 성능 평가는 향후 연구에서 해결하도록 한다.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
• /
• v.22 no.6
• /
• pp.14-22
• /
• 2014

An autonomous vehicle requires a technology of generating maps by recognizing surrounding environment. The recognition of the vehicle's environment can be achieved by using distance information from a 2D laser scanner and color information from a camera. Such sensor information is used to generate 2D or 3D maps. A 2D map is used mostly for generating routs, because it contains information only about a section. In contrast, a 3D map involves height values also, and therefore can be used not only for generating routs but also for finding out vehicle accessible space. Nevertheless, an autonomous vehicle using 3D maps has difficulty in recognizing environment in real time. Accordingly, this paper proposes the technology for generating 2D maps that guarantee real-time recognition. The proposed technology uses only the color information obtained by removing height values from 3D maps generated based on the fusion of 2D laser scanner and camera data.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
• /
• 2001.05a
• /
• pp.136-139
• /
• 2001

This paper develops a sensor based navigation method that utilizes fuzzy logic and the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory for mobile robot in uncertain environment. The proposed navigator consists of two behaviors: obstacle avoidance and goal seeking. To navigate reliably in the environment, we make a map building process before the robot finds a goal position and create a robust fuzzy controller. In this paper, the map is constructed on a two-dimensional occupancy grid. The sensor readings are fused into the map using D-S inference rule. Whenever the robot moves, it catches new information about the environment and replaces the old map with new one. With that process the robot can go wandering and finding the goal position. The usefulness of the proposed method is verified by a series of simulations. This paper deals with the fuzzy modeling for the complex and uncertain nonlinear systems, in which conventional and mathematical models may fail to give satisfactory results. Finally, we provide numerical examples to evaluate the feasibility and generality of the proposed method in this paper.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.17 no.5
• /
• pp.1339-1355
• /
• 2023

Localization is a hot research spot for many areas, especially in the mobile robot field. Due to the weak signal of the global positioning system (GPS), the alternative schemes in an indoor environment include wireless signal transmitting and receiving solutions, laser rangefinder to build a map followed by a re-localization stage and visual positioning methods, etc. Among all wireless signal positioning techniques, Wi-Fi is the most common one. Wi-Fi access points are installed in most indoor areas of human activities, and smart devices equipped with Wi-Fi modules can be seen everywhere. However, the localization of a mobile robot using a Wi-Fi scheme usually lacks orientation information. Besides, the distance error is large because of indoor signal interference. Another research direction that mainly refers to laser sensors is to actively detect the environment and achieve positioning. An occupancy grid map is built by using the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method when the mobile robot enters the indoor environment for the first time. When the robot enters the environment again, it can localize itself according to the known map. Nevertheless, this scheme only works effectively based on the prerequisite that those areas have salient geometrical features. If the areas have similar scanning structures, such as a long corridor or similar rooms, the traditional methods always fail. To address the weakness of the above two methods, this work proposes a coarse-to-fine paradigm and an improved localization algorithm that utilizes Wi-Fi to assist the robot localization in a geometrically similar environment. Firstly, a grid map is built by using laser SLAM. Secondly, a fingerprint database is built in the offline phase. Then, the RSSI values are achieved in the localization stage to get a coarse localization. Finally, an improved particle filter method based on the Wi-Fi signal values is proposed to realize a fine localization. Experimental results show that our approach is effective and robust for both global localization and the kidnapped robot problem. The localization success rate reaches 97.33%, while the traditional method always fails.