• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.888-894
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• 2016

This paper presents the kinematic and dynamic analysis of the robot arm for inspection and rescue operations. The inspection robot arm has Pitch-Pitch-Pitch-Yaw motion for an optimal and stable view of the camera installed at the end of the manipulator. The rescue operation robot arm has Yaw-Pitch-Pitch-Roll motion to handle heavy tools. Additionally, both robot arms are waterproof, as they use the triple-layer O-ring. Furthermore, the dynamic equation including the damping force due to the mechanical seal for waterproofness was derived by using the Newton-Euler method. A control system using the ARM processor was developed and introduced in this paper, and its performance was verified through experiments.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.439-446
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• 2014

An amphibious inspection robot system (hereafter AIROS) is being developed to visually inspect the in-containment refueling storage water tank (hereafter IRWST) strainer in APR1400 instead of a human diver. Four IRWST strainers are located in the IRWST, which is filled with boric acid water. Each strainer has 108 sub-assembly strainer fin modules that should be inspected with the VT-3 method according to Reg. guide 1.82 and the operation manual. AIROS has 6 thrusters for submarine voyage and 4 legs for walking on the top of the strainer. An inverse kinematic algorithm was implemented in the robot controller for exact walking on the top of the IRWST strainer. The IRWST strainer has several top cross braces that are extruded on the top of the strainer, which can be obstacles of walking on the strainer, to maintain the frame of the strainer. Therefore, a robot leg should arrive at the position beside the top cross brace. For this reason, we used an image processing technique to find the top cross brace in the sole camera image. The sole camera image is processed to find the existence of the top cross brace using the cross edge detection algorithm in real time. A 5-DOF robot arm that has multiple camera modules for simultaneous inspection of both sides can penetrate narrow gaps. For intuitive presentation of inspection results and for management of inspection data, inspection images are stored in the control PC with camera angles and positions to synthesize and merge the images. The synthesized images are then mapped in a 3D CAD model of the IRWST strainer with the location information. An IRWST strainer mock-up was fabricated to teach the robot arm scanning and gaiting. It is important to arrive at the designated position for inserting the robot arm into all of the gaps. Exact position control without anchor under the water is not easy. Therefore, we designed the multi leg robot for the role of anchoring and positioning. Quadruped robot design of installing sole cameras was a new approach for the exact and stable position control on the IRWST strainer, unlike a traditional robot for underwater facility inspection. The developed robot will be practically used to enhance the efficiency and reliability of the inspection of nuclear power plant components.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.68-72
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• 2015

Ultrasonic inspection robot systems have been widely researched and developed for the real-time monitoring of structures such as power plants. However, an inspection robot that is operated in a simple pattern has limitations in its application to various structures in a plant facility because of the diverse and complicated shapes of the inspection objects. Therefore, accurate control of the robot is required to inspect complicated objects with high-precision results. This paper presents the idea that the shape and movement information of an ultrasonic inspector's hand could be profitably utilized for the accurate control of robot. In this study, a polymer flex sensor was applied to monitor the shape of a human hand. This application was designed to intuitively control an ultrasonic inspection robot. The movement and shape of the hand were estimated by applying multiple sensors. Moreover, it was successfully shown that a test robot could be intuitively controlled based on the shape of a human hand estimated using polymer flex sensors.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.803-807
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• 2003

Tele-operation and remote monitoring techniques are essential and important technologies for performing the inspection and repair tasks effectively in nuclear power plants. This paper presents the application of a mobile robot for the remote monitoring and inspection of the Calandria faces, where human access is limited because of the high-level radioactive environments during full power operation. The mobile robot was designed with reconfigurable crawler type of wheels attached on the front and rear side in order to pass through the ditch. The extendable mast, mounted on the mobile robot, can be extended up to 8 m vertically. This robot was also equipped a visible CCD/thermal infrared inspection head module and a stereo camera module for the enhancement of visual inspection.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.33-38
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• 2013

The general purposed control system for driving a motion of many different typed robot end-effector, which consists of a controller based on ARM Cotex M3-11017 MCU and an application software for generating a motion of end-effector, was developed. Experimental results show that a positioning error is nearly negligible and a repeatability error is 0.04%. Accordingly the developed control system can be applied practically to actuate a robot end-effector for inspection and maintenance of steam generator heat pipe in nuclear power plant.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.161-164
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• 2006

In this thesis we designed the vision system to inspect the defect of a back light unit of plat panel display device. The vision system is divided into hardware and inspection algorithm of defect. Hardware components consist of illumination part, robot-arm controller part and image-acquisition part. Illumination part is made of acrylic panel for light diffusion and five 36W FPL's(Fluorescent Parallel Lamp) and electronic ballast with low frequency harmonics. The CCD(Charge-Coupled Device) camera of image-acquisition part is able to acquire the bright image by the light coming from lamp. The image-acquisition part is composed of CCD camera and frame grabber. The robot-arm controller part has a role to let the CCD camera move to the desired position. To take inspections of surface images of a flat panel display it can be controlled and located every nook and comer. Images obtained by robot-arm and image-acquisition board are saved on the hard-disk through windows programming and are tested whether there are defects by using the image processing algorithms.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.648-657
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• 2014

This paper is about the study on a newly developed small waterproofed 4-axis robot arm and the analysis of its kinematics and dynamics. The structure of robot arm is designed to have Pitch-Pitch-Pitch-Yaw joint motion for inspection using a camera on itself and the joint actuator driving capacity are selected and the joint actuators are designed and test for 10m waterproofness. The closed-form solution for the robot arm is derived through the forward and inverse kinematics analysis. Also, the dynamics model equation including the damping force due to the mechanical seal for waterproofness is derived using Newton-Euler method. Using derived dynamics equation, a sliding mode controller is designed to track the desired path of the developed robot arm, and its performance is verified through a simulation.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1991.10a
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• pp.1139-1143
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• 1991

Using industrial robots and sensors, we developed an inline car body inspection system which proposes high flexibility and sufficient accuracy. Car Body Inspection(CBI) cell consists of two industrial robots, two corresponding carriages, camera vision system, a process computer with multi-tasking ability and several LDS's. As industrial robots guarantee sufficient repeatabilities, the CBI cell adopts the concept of relative measurement instead of that of absolute measurement. By comparing the actual measured data with reference data, the dimensional errors of the corresponding points can be calculated. The length of the robot arms changes according to ambient temperature and it affects the measuring accuracy. To compensate this error, a robot arm calibration process was realized. By measuring a reference jig, the differential changes of the robot arms due to temperature fluctuation can be calculated and compensated.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.06e
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• pp.193-196
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• 2002

In this paper, we presents the remote inspection activity with a mobile robot at the calandria face areas of the PHWR (pressurized heavy water reactor) nuclear power plants during full power plant operation.. The tele-operated mobile robot has been developed for this task. A 4 wheeled mechanism with the dual reconfigurable crawler arm has been adopted for the ease access to the high radiation area of calandria face. A specially designed extendable long reach mast attached on the mobile platform and the thermal image monitoring system enable human eyes to look into the calandria face. Application of robot will keep human workers from high radiation exposure and enhance the reliability of nuclear power plants.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.27-34
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• 2014

This paper proposes a new approach to the designed of visual feedback control system based on visual servoing method. The main focus of this paper is presented how it is effective to use many features for improving the accuracy of the visual feedback control of industrial articulated robot for assembling and inspection of parts. Some rank conditions, which relate the image Jacobian, and the control performance are derived. It is also proven that the accuracy is improved by increasing the number of features. The effectiveness of redundant features is verified by the real time experiments on a SCARA type robot(FARA) made in samsung electronics company.