• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.446-455
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• 2010

The research presented covers the design and control method of unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). An electric vehicle is used and is driven by DC motor. The power system on the UGV has been adjusted and actuators have been installed for steering and brake automation. A toggle switch is implemented to easily switch between manual and autonomous states. The UGV state is monitored by a velocity sensor, as well as steering and brake position sensors. An emergency stop device was designed and installed to quickly and safely stop the UGV. Different control methods, including the PID controller, were studied for improved steering responsiveness, and results were confirmed through experimentation. Satisfactory performance was achieved and several possible areas of future research have arisen.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.809-817
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• 2008

This paper describes an obstacle detecting system of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The unmanned ground vehicle is consists of several systems such as vehicle control system, navigation system, obstacle detecting system and integration system. Among these systems, the obstacle detecting system is a driving assistance system of UGV. Through the UGV is driving, the system detects obstacles such as cars, human, tree, curb and hills and then send information of obstacles position to integration system for safety driving. In this research, the obstacle detecting system is composed of 5 laser scanners and develop algorithms of detecting obstacles, curb, uphill and downhill road.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.85-92
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• 2010

This study shows the path generation algorithm for an UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle). The developed UGV frame which has a 4-wheel driven mechanism and diesel source is applied. Proposed vehicle system in this research is aimed to military purpose. To achieve the unmanned autonomous driving, following two main issues are considered. First, behavior module for positioning and posture of vehicle system and second, cognition module to receive the information from environment are proposed and verified. To do this, rover which can acquire the positioning information from earth coordinate and IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) which can measure the posture are combined to design the path planning algorithm.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.327-334
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• 2011

It is necessary that UGV(Unmanned Ground Vehicle) should generate a real-time travesability index map by analyzing raw terrain information to travel autonomously tough terrain which has various slope and roughness values. In this paper, we propose a local path planning method, $MA^*$(Modified $A^*$) algorithm, using DVGM (Directional Velocity Grid Map) for unmanned ground vehicle. We also present a path optimization algorithm and a path smoothing algorithm which regenerate a pre-planned local path by $MA^*$ algorithm into the reasonable local path considering the mobility of UGV. Field test is conducted with UGV in order to verify the performance of local path planning method using DVGM. The local path planned by $MA^*$ is compared with the result of $A^*$ to verify the safety and optimality of proposed algorithm.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.101-106
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• 2010

Researches on air-ground robot cooperating system has been made recently. The cooperation among homogeneous robots focused on the architecture of the system, quality and influence of the communication. In contrast, the cooperation among heterogeneous robots such as aerial vehicle and ground vehicle robots has not been much handled. There are a couple of main points for those air-ground cooperating robots. One is using UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) as an extra sensor of UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle). This kind of application is usually used in situations such as guiding UGV to an appropriate path which could be better determined from the eye in the sky as UAV. The other main application of air-ground cooperating robot system is the localization. By combining sensor information from both UAV and UGV, the robot system as a whole can localize a target object or find features in the environment with better performance than UGV or UAV alone. Although these applications are recently studied in many different ways and devices, there are still a lot of possibilities in the field of air-ground cooperating robot systems. We introduce those research fields in this paper.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.1246-1253
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• 2009

To be high efficient for a navigation of unmanned ground vehicle, it must be able to distinguish between safe and hazardous regions in its immediate environment. We present an advanced method using laser range finder for building global 2D digital maps that include environment information. Laser range finder is used for mapping of obstacles and driving environment in the 2D laser plane. Rotary encoders are used for localization of UGV. The main contributions of this research are the development of an algorithm for global 2D map building and it will turn a UGV navigation based on map matching into a possibility. In this paper, a map building algorithm will be introduced and an assessment of algorithm reliability is judged at an each environment.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.549-556
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• 2009

One of the basic technology for implementing the autonomy of UGV(Unmanned Ground Vehicle) is a path planning algorithm using obstacle and raw terrain information which are gathered from perception sensors such as stereo camera and laser scanner. In this paper, we propose a generation method of DVGM(Directional Velocity Grid Map) which have traverse speed of UGV for the five heading directions except the rear one. The fuzzy system is designed to generate a resonable traveling speed for DVGM from current patch to the next one by using terrain slope, roughness and obstacle information extracted from raw world model data. A simulation is conducted with world model data sampled from real terrain so as to verify the performance of proposed fuzzy inference system.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.856-864
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• 2008

This paper describes a vehicle low speed driving assistant (VLDA) system that is composed of laser scanner. This vehicle is designed for following lead vehicle (LV) without driver's operation. The system is made up several component systems that are based on unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Each component system is applied to use advanced safety vehicle developed to complete UGV system. VLDA system was divided into vehicle control system and obstacle detecting system. The obstacle detecting system calculate distance and angle of LV and transmit these data to vehicle control system using front, left and right laser scanners. Vehicle control system makes vehicle control values such as steering angle, acceleration and brake position and control vehicle's movement with steering, acceleration and brake actuators. In this research, we designed VLDA system like as low speed cruise control system and test it on real road environments.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.998-1003
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• 2013

This study proposes an adaptive control algorithm for lateral motion of a UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) using an NN (Neural Networks). The lateral motion of the UGV can be corrupted with various uncertainties such as side slip. In order to compensate the performance degradation of the UGV under various uncertainties, an NN-based adaptive control is designed by utilizing a virtual control concept. Since both the drift and input gain terms are uncertain, the proposed method adapts the whole terms related to the difference between the nominal and real systems. To avoid a singularity problem with the adaptive control, the affine property of the UGV dynamic model is utilized and the overall closed-loop stability is analyzed rigorously. Finally, numerical simulations using Carsim are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.244-250
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• 2008

This paper describes the design and implementation of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and also estimates how well autonomous navigation and remote control of UGV can be performed through the optimized arbitration of several sensor data, which are acquired from vision, obstacle detection, positioning system, etc. For the autonomous navigation, lane detection and tracing, global positioning, and obstacle avoidance are necessarily required. In addition, for the remote control, two types of experimental environments are established. One is to use a commercial racing wheel module, and the other is to use a haptic device that is useful for a user application based on virtual reality. Experimental results show that autonomous navigation and remote control of the designed UGV can be achieved with more effectiveness and accuracy using the proper arbitration of sensor data and navigation plan.