• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.11
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• pp.4087-4094
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• 2010

The sensor data which is measured by Quadruped robot is utilized to recognize the physical environment or other information and to control the posture and walking of robot system. In order to control the robot precisely, high accuracy of sensor data is required, most of these sensors however, belongs to expensive and low-durable products. Moreover, these are exposed excessive load operation in a field condition if it is applied to field robot system. This issue becomes more serious one when the robot system is manufactured as a mass product. As in this context, this study suggests a virtual sensor technology to alternate or assist the main sensor system. This scheme is realized by using back-propagation algorithm of neural network theory, and the quality of estimated sensor data could be improved through the algorithmic and hardware based treatments. This study performs the various trial to identify the effective parameters which effect to the quality and reliability of estimated sensor data and tries to show the possibility of proposed methodology.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.41 no.8
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• pp.771-782
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• 2017

This paper describes the development of a wearable robot to assist ankle power for the elderly. Previously developed wearable robots have generally used motors and gears to assist muscle power during walking. However, the combination of motor and reduction gear is heavy and has limitations on the simultaneous control of stiffness and torque due to the friction of the gear reducer unlike human muscles. Therefore, in this study, Mckibben pneumatic muscle, which is lighter, safer, and more powerful than an electric motor with gear, was used to assist ankle joint. Antagonistic actuation using a pair of pneumatic muscles assisted the power of the soleus muscles and tibialis anterior muscles used for the pitching motion of the ankle joint, and the model parameters of the antagonistic actuator were experimentally derived using a muscle test platform. To recognize the wearer's walking intention, foot load and ankle torque were calculated by measuring the pressure and the center of pressure of the foot using force and linear displacement sensors, and the stiffness and the torque of the pneumatic muscle joint were then controlled by the calculated ankle torque and foot load. Finally, the performance of the developed ankle power assistive robot was experimentally verified by measuring EMG signals during walking experiments on a treadmill.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.315-322
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• 2009

This paper explains a control and navigation algorithm of a 6-DOF gait rehabilitation robot, which can allow a patient to navigate in virtual reality (VR) by upper and lower limbs interactions. In gait rehabilitation robots, one of the important concerns is not only to follow the robot motions passively, but also to allow the patient to walk by his/her intention. Thus, this robot allows automatic walking velocity update by estimating interaction torques between the human and the upper limb device, and synchronizing the upper limb device to the lower limb device. In addition, the upper limb device acts as a user-friendly input device for navigating in virtual reality. By pushing the switches located at the right and left handles of the upper limb device, a patient is able to do turning motions during navigation in virtual reality. Through experimental results of a healthy subject, we showed that rehabilitation training can be more effectively combined to virtual environments with upper and lower limb connections. The suggested navigation scheme for gait rehabilitation robot will allow various and effective rehabilitation training modes.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.96-103
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• 2009

This paper describes a humanoid robot's intelligent foot with two six-axis force/moment sensors. The developed humanoid robots didn't get the intelligent feet for walking on uneven surface safely. In order to walk on uneven surface safely, the robot should measure the reaction forces and moments applied on the sales of the feet, and they should be controlled with the measured the forces and moments. In this paper, an intelligent foot for a humanoid robot was developed. First, the body of foot was designed to be rotated the toe and the heel to all directions, second, the six-axis force/moment sensors were manufactured, third, the high-speed controller was manufactured using DSP(digital signal processor), fourth, the humanoid robot's intelligent foot was manufactured using the body of foot, two six-axis force/moment sensors and the high-speed controller, finally, the characteristic test of the intelligent foot was carried out. It is thought that the foot could be used for a humanoid robot.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.276-280
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• 2020

A linear piezoelectric actuator that utilizes the elliptical motion of the two tips of the actuator is proposed. This device is easy to fabricate owing to its simple structure, consisting of three piezo ceramic benders and is suitable for use in micro robotic applications. A π-shaped structure, which was composed of four piezo ceramic benders, was constructed. Two of the benders were positioned on the center of the actuator, and the joints were attached at the ends of the cantilever. The other two benders were positioned on the side of the actuator and were attached between the joint and the tips. The actuator structure was designed to obtain the first bending mode of the horizontal vibration and the vertical vibration at the same frequency, resulting in elliptical motions at the tips. When two sinusoidal wave voltages with a 90-degree phase difference were applied to the two pairs of the actuator benders, elliptical motions were obtained at the tips. The driving characteristics of the prototype actuator were then measured using a laser doppler vibrometer.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.86-93
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• 2021

This paper proposes a controller to regulate the supply pressure of the hydraulic power unit (HPU) for driving a bipedal robot. We establish flow rate models for charging accumulator, actuating joints and leaking from actuators and spool valves. This determines the pump driving motor speed to satisfy the demanded flow rate for operating the bipedal robot without the energy loss caused by the bypass through a pressure regulating valve. We apply proposed controller to an onboard HPU mounted on top of bipedal robot platform with twelve degrees of freedom. We implement air-walking motion and squat motion which require variable flow rate to the bipedal robot. Through this experiment, the energy efficiency of proposed controller was verified by comparing the electric energy consumed when the controller was applied and when the pump operated at constant speed. We also shows the capability of the HPU's control performance to regulate supply pressure.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.147-154
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• 2021

One of the most challenging issues when robots interact with the environment is to establish contact quickly and avoid high impact force at the same time. The proposed method implements the passive suspension system using the redundancy of the torque-controlled robot. Instead of utilizing the actual mechanical compliance, the distal joints near the end-effector are controlled to act as a virtual spring-damper system with low feedback gains. The proximal joints are precisely controlled to push the mid-link, which is defined as the boundary link between the proximal and distal joints, towards the environment with high feedback gains. Compared to the active compliance methods, the contact force measurements or estimates are not required for contact establishment and the control time delay problems do not occur correspondingly. The proposed method was applied to the landing foot control of the 12-DoF biped robot DYROS-RED in the simulations. In the results, the impact force during landing was significantly reduced at the same collision speed.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.407-416
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• 2022

Multiple AMRs have been proved to be effective in improving warehouse productivity by eliminating workers' wasteful walking time. Although Multi-agent Path Finding (MAPF)-based solution is an optimal approach for this task, its deployment in practice is challenging mainly due to its imperfect plan-execution capabilities and insufficient computing resources for high-density environments. In this paper, we present a MAPF-based fleet management system architecture that robustly manages multiple robots by re-computing their paths whenever it is necessary. To achieve this, we defined four events that trigger our MAPF solver framework to generate new paths. These paths are then delivered to each AMR through ROS2 message topic. We also optimized a graph structure that effectively captures spatial information of the warehouse. By using this graph structure we can reduce computational burden while keeping its rescheduling functionality. With proposed MAPF-based fleet management system, we can control AMRs without collision or deadlock. We applied our fleet management system to the real logistics warehouse with 10 AMRs and observed that it works without a problem. We also present the usage statistic of adopting AMRs with proposed fleet management system to the warehouse. We show that it is useful over 25% of daily working time.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.444-449
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• 2020

I proposed small ambulatory robot actuators using piezoelectric benders. In order to make the motion of the biomimetic robot legs similar to the movements of the cockroaches or similar insects, two pairs of legs in the diagonal direction in the four leg structures are required to make the same movement. And elliptical displacement is realized by taking into account horizontal and vertical displacement of multimode oscillations and driving them by electrical signals with differences step by step, for example of 90° the T-shaped robot actuator showed wide range of speed (From 2 mm/sec. up to 266 mm/sec.) and ability of transportation (up to 10 g with 50 mm/s). Locomotive performance of the robot was competitive to the preceding robots, and moreover, the modular type actuators of a segmented myriapods robot could be added and removed for different tasks or performances.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.293-300
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• 2016

The Voice recognition is one of convenient methods to communicate between human and robots. This study proposes a speech recognition method using speech recognizers based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with a combination of techniques to enhance a biped robot control. In the past, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Dynamic Time Wrapping (DTW) were used, however, currently they are less commonly applied to speech recognition systems. This Research confirms that the HMM, an accepted high-performance technique, can be successfully employed to model speech signals. High recognition accuracy can be obtained by using HMMs. Apart from speech modeling techniques, multiple feature extraction methods have been studied to find speech stresses caused by emotions and the environment to improve speech recognition rates. The procedure consisted of 2 parts: one is recognizing robot commands using multiple HMM recognizers, and the other is sending recognized commands to control a robot. In this paper, a practical voice recognition system which can recognize a lot of task commands is proposed. The proposed system consists of a general purpose microprocessor and a useful voice recognition processor which can recognize a limited number of voice patterns. By simulation and experiment, it was illustrated the reliability of voice recognition rates for application of the manufacturing process.