Tactile sensation is one of the most important sensory functions along with the auditory sensation for the visually impaired since it replaces the visual one of the persons with sight. In this paper, we present a tactile display device as a dynamic Braille display that is the unique tool f3r exchanging information among them. The tactile cell of the Braille display proposed is based on the dielectric elastomer, which is one of the electroactive polymers. It has advantageous features over the existing ones with respect to intrinsic softness, ease of fabrication, cost effectiveness and miniaturization. We introduce a new idea for actuation as well as additional considerations such as the driving circuit that makes it possible to drive multiple tactile cells in a high speed. Also, we describe the actuating mechanism of the Braille pin in details capable of realizing the enhanced spatial density of the tactile cells. Finally, results of psychophysical experiments are given to evaluate its effectiveness.

This paper deals with the idea of Electroactive paper (EAPap) actuator and its application possibility. EAPap is a paper that produces large displacement under electrical excitation. EAPap is made with a cellulose paper by constructing thin electrodes on both sides of the paper. When electrical voltage is applied on the electrodes, the EAPap produces bending displacement. EAPap has merits in terms of lightweight, dryness, large displacement output, low actuation voltage and low power consumption. Since the power requirement is so small that it is suitable for microwave-driven smart actuators. This paper describes the working principle and performance of EAPap as an artificial muscle and its possibility far many applications.

This study has introduced how to make conducting shape memory polyurethane(CSMPu) as a possible application to smart actuators. Different from conventional polyurethane, CSMPu can have a high conductivity and then electric power supplies enough energy to deform. To prepare conducting polyurethane, carbon nanotubes were incorporated into shape memory polyurethane. Basic experiments to reveal its characteristics have been conducted for a development of actuators. From the results conducted in the present study, optimized conditions for the process of actuating deformation were found. Thermo-electric characteristics such as the relation between temperature and specific resistance and trend curves of resistance variations according to elongations were measured. These data provided a strong possibility of CSMPu as a smart actuator.

Specialized propulsors for naval applications have numerous opportunities in terms of research, design and fabrication of an appropriate propulsor. One of the most important components of any propulsor is the actuator that provides the mode of locomotion. Ionomeric electro-active polymer may offer an attractive solution for locomotion of small propulsors. A common ionomeric electro-active polymer, ionic Polymer-Metal Composites (IPHCs) give large true bending deformations under low driving voltages, operate in aqueous environments, are capable of transduction and are relatively well understood. IPMC fabrication and operation are presented to further elucidate the use of the material for a propulsor. Various materials, including IPMCs, are investigated and a simplified propulsor model is explored.

Face robots capable of expressing their emotional status, can be adopted as an efficient tool for friendly communication between the human and the machine. In this paper, we present a face robot actuated with artificial muscle based on dielectric elastomer. By exploiting the properties of polymers, it is possible to actuate the covering skin, eyes as well as provide human-like expressivity without employing complicated mechanisms. The robot is driven by seven types of actuator modules such as eye, eyebrow, eyelid, brow, cheek, jaw and neck module corresponding to movements of facial muscles. Although they are only part of the whole set of facial motions, our approach is sufficient to generate six fundamental facial expressions such as surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness. Each module communicates with the others via CAN communication protocol fur the desired emotional expressions, the facial motions are generated by combining the motions of each actuator module. A prototype of the robot has been developed and several experiments have been conducted to validate its feasibility.

Many different polymeric materials are introduced fur the alternative solutions of electro-mechanical actuators. Although light weight and grate flexibility of the material deserves notable attention from enormous publications, few of the publication has discussed feasibility study for actual industrial applications. Most of the previous work demonstrated plain movement of the material without delineating any design concept that guarantees 'controllable action'. The present work introduces a noble design concept that provides controllable action and the concept is verified through a modeling and a simulation of the actuation method.

Carbon nanotubes have outstanding properties which make them useful for a number of high-technology applications. Especially, single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT), working under physical conditions (in aqueous solution) and converting electrical energy into mechanical energy directly, can be a good substitute for artificial muscle. The carbon nanotube structure simulated in this paper is an isotropic cantilever type with an adhesive tape which is sandwiched between two SWNTs. For predicting the geometrical and physical parameters such as deflection, slope, bending moment and induced force with various applied voltages, the analytical model for a 3 layer bimorph nanotube actuator is developed by applying Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. The governing equation and boundary conditions are derived from energy Principles. Also, the brief history of carbon nonotube is overviewed and its properties are compared with other functional materials. Moreover, an electro-mechanical coupling coefficient of the carbon nanotube actuator is discussed to identify the electro-mechanical energy efficiency.

In the present paper, equivalent beam and equivalent bimorph beam models for IPMC(ionic Polymer-Metal Composite) actuators are described. Physical properties of an IPMC, such as Young's modulus and electro-mechanical coupling coefficient. are determined from the rule of mixture, bimorph beam equations, and measured force-displacement data of a cantilevered IPMC actuator. By using a beam equation with estimated physical properties, actuation displacements of a cantilevered IPMC actuator was calculated and a good agreement between the computed tip displacements and the measured data was observed. Finite element analysis(FEA) combined with the estimated physical properties was used to reproduce the force-displacement relationship of an IPMC actuator. Results from the FEA agreed well with the measure data. The proposed models might be used for modeling of IPMC actuators with complicated shapes and boundary conditions.

In this paper, a cost-effective integrated 3D system for measuring and sizing foot is proposed. The proposed system employs two CCDs and a laser line projector which are capable of accurately measuring foot. The measurement is based upon the biologically motivated stereo vision principle providing ruggedness against minor system distortions. According to the tolerance, calibration between two different views are implicitly applied. Furthermore, the measurement system employs a measurement base, a frame grabber, a CCD moving cart, a stepping motor and computer. Analysis and design procedure is presented for the calculation of the 3D foot data and the proposed system. Experimental results on the proposed system would verify the concept and system operation.

In this paper, an embedded foot pressure measurement system is proposed to measure foot pressure based on the embedded Linux system. To measure foot pressure data and to evaluate foot pressure distribution for the different insoles, FSR sensor, A/D converter, iPAQ PDA, and a time division measurement method are employed in the system. Utilizing this system, the foot pressure analysis has been performed for the different four shoes. The number of foot pressure/voltage conversion circuits are drastically decreased by the proposed time division measurement method from 406 to 14. The experimental results for the sandal, slipper, oxford shoes and sneakers demonstrate that the proposed system successfully performs the foot pressure measurement.

Ultrasonic sensors are widely used in mobile robot applications to recognize external environments by virtue that they are cheap, easy to use, and robust under varying lighting conditions. In most cases, a single ultrasonic sensor is used to measure the distance to an object based on time-of-flight (TOF) information, whereas multiple sensors are used to recognize the shape of an object, such as a comer, plane, or edge. However, the conventional sequential driving technique involves a long measurement time. This problem can be resolved by pulse coding of ultrasonic signals, which allows multi-sensors to be emitted simultaneously and adjacent objects to be distinguished. Accordingly, this paper presents a new simultaneous coded driving system for an ultrasonic sensor array for object recognition in autonomous mobile robots. The proposed system is designed and implemented. A micro-controller unit is implemented using a DSP, Polaroid 6500 ranging modules are modified for firing the coded signals, and a 5-channel coded signal generating board is made using a FPGA. To verify the proposed method, experiments were conducted in an environment with overlapping signals, and the flight distances fur each sensor were obtained from the received overlapping signals using correlations and conversion to a bipolar PCM-NRZ signal.

In this paper, a new fault detection and isolation algorithm fur inertial sensor system is proposed. To identify the inertial sensor fault, single antenna GPS receiver is used as an effective redundancy source. To use GPS receiver as redundancy for the inertial sensors, the algorithm to estimate the attitude and acceleration using single antenna GPS receiver is adopted. By using Doppler shift of carrier phase signal and kinetic characteristics of aircraft, attitude information of aircraft can be obtained at the coordinated flight condition. Based on this idea, fault diagnosis algorithm for inertial sensors using single antenna GPS based attitude is proposed. For more effective FDI, decision variables considering the aircraft maneuver are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified through the numerical simulations.

This paper described a novel locomotion interface that can generate infinite floor for various surface, named as virtual walking machine. This interface allows users to participate in a life-like walking experience in virtual environments, which include various terrains such as plains, slopes and stair ground surfaces. The interface is composed of two three-DOF (X, Y, Yaw) planar devices and two four-DOF (Pitch, Roll, Z, and relative rotation) footpads. The planar devices are driven by AC servomotors for generating fast motions, while the footpad devices are driven by pneumatic actuators for continuous support of human weight. To simulate natural human walking, the locomotion interface design specification are acquired based on gait analysis and each mechanism is optimally designed and manufactured to satisfy the given requirements. The designed locomotion interface allows natural walking(step: 0.8m, height: 20cm, load capability: 100kg, slope:30deg) for various terrains.

Bluetooth technology is essentially a method for wireless connectivity of a diverse set of devices ranging from PDAs, mobile phone, notebook computers, to another equipments, The bluetooth system both point-to point connection and point-to multipoint connection. In point-to multipoint connection, the channel is shared among several bluetooth devices. Two or more devices sharing the same channel form a piconet. There one master device and up to seven active slave devices in a piconet. The radio operates in the unlicensed 2.45GHz ISM band. This allows users who travel world-wide to use bluetooth equipments anywhere. Since the link is based on frequency-hop spread spectrum, multiple channels can exist at the same time. The bluetooth standard ha s been suggested that bluetooth equipments can be used in the short-range, maximum 100 meters. It has been defined that the time takes to setup and establish a bluetooth connection among devices is 10 seconds. It is a long time and may be a cause to lose a chance of finding other non-fixed devices. We propose a routing protocols for scatternets which can be used to control a mobile units(MUs) in this network. The proposed routing protocol is composed of two kinds of bluetooth information, access point(AP) and MU.

This paper presents a distributed precedence queue mechanism to resolve unexpected transmission delay of a lower priority transaction in a CAN based system, which keeps a fixed priority in data transaction. The mechanism is implemented in the upper sub-layer of the data link layer(DLL), which is fully compatible with the original medium access control layer protocol of CAN. Thus the mechanism can be implemented dynamically while the data transactions are going on without any hardware modification. The CAN protocol was originally developed to be used in the automotive industry, and it was recently applied for a broader class of automated factories. Even though CAN is able to satisfy most of real-time requirements found in automated environments, it is not to enforce either a fair subdivision of the network bandwidth among the stations or a satisfactory distribution of the access delays in message transmission. The proposed solution provides a superset of the CAN logical link layer control, which can coexist with the older CAN applications. Through the real experiments, effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is verified.

Optimal collision avoidance algorithm for unmanned aerial vehicles based on proportional navigation guidance law is investigated this paper. Although proportional navigation guidance law is widely used in missile guidance problems, it can be used in collision avoidance problem by guiding the relative velocity vector to collision avoidance vector. The optimal navigation coefficient can be obtained if an obstacle if an obstacle moves at constant velocity vector. The stability of the proposed algorithm is also investigated. The stability can be obtained by choosing a proper navigation coefficient.

It is a fuzzy controller that it is the most used method in the control of non-linear system. The most important part in the fuzzy controller is a design of fuzzy rules. Many algorithm that design fuzzy rules have proposed. And attention to the evolutionary computation is increasing in the recent days. Among them, the co-evolutionary algorithm is used in the design of optimal fuzzy rule. This paper takes advantage of a schema co-evolutionary algorithm. In order to verify the efficiency of the schema co-evolutionary algorithm, a fuzzy controller for the mobile robot control is designed by the schema co-evolutionary algorithm and it is compared with other parasitic co-evolutionary algorithm such as a virus-evolutionary genetic algorithm and a co-evolutionary method of Handa.

In this Paper we discuss an algorithm for a real-time transmission of moving color image on the TCP/IP network using wavelet transform and neural network. The Image frames received from the camera are two-level wavelet-transformed in the server, and are transmitted to the client on the network. Then, the client performs the inverse wavelet-transform using only the received pieces of each image frame within the prescribed time limit to display the moving images. When the TCP/IP network is busy, only a fraction of each image frame will be delivered. When the line is free, the whole frame of each image will be transferred to the client. The receiver warns the sender of the condition of traffic congestion in the network by sending a special short frame for this specific purpose. The sender can respond to this information of warning by simply reducing the data rate which is adjusted with a neural network or fuzzy logic. In this way we can send a stream of moving images adaptively adjusting to the network traffic condition.

This paer presents a feedback-controlled, MEMS-fabricated microaccelerometer($\mu$XL). The $\mu$XL has received much commercial attraction, but its performance is generally limited. To improve the open-loop performance, a feedback controller is designed and experimentally evaluated. The feedback controller is applied to the x/y-axis $\mu$XL fabricated by sacrificial bulk micromachining(SBM) process. Even though the resolution of the closed-loop system is slightly worse than open-loop system, the bandwidth, linearity, and bias stability are stability are significantly improved. The noise equivalent resolution of open-loop system is 0.615 mg and that of closed-loop system is 0.864 mg. The bandwidths of open-loop and closed-loop system are over 100Hz. The input range, non-linearity and bias stability are improved from $\pm10\;g\;to\;\pm18g$, from 11.1%FSO to 0.86%FSO, and from 0.221 mg to 0.128 mg by feedback control, respectively.

Diseases in the gastro-intestinal track are on an increasing trend. In order to diagnose a patient, the various signals of the digestive organ, such as temperature, pH, and pressure, can offer the helpful information. Among the above mentioned signals, we choose the pressure variation as a monitoring signal. The variation of a pressure signal of the gastro-intestinal track can offer the information of a digestive trouble or some clues of the diseases. In this paper, a pressure monitoring system for the digestive organs of a living pig is presented. This system concept is to transmit the measured biomedical signals from a transmitter in a living pig to wireless receiver that is positioned out of body. The integrated solution includes the following parts: (1) the swallow type pressure capsule, (2) the receiving set consisting of a receiver, decoder box, and PC. The merit of the proposed system if that the monitoring system can supply the precise and repeatable pressure in the gastro-intestinal track. In addition, the design of low power consumption enables it to keep sending reliable signals while the pressure capsule is working in the digestive organ. The subject of the study for the pressure monitoring system is in-vivo experiments for a living pig. We achieved the pressure tracings in digestive organs and verified the validity of system after several in-vivo tests using pressure monitoring system. As a result, we found each organ has its own characterized pressure fluctuation.

In this paper, a novel sliding surface is proposed to guarantee that the sliding mode controller for a second order system produces a control signal whose magnitude is always within the bound of input saturation. The proposed sliding surface uses a time-varying function, and its time derivative works to make a control signal within the bounds of input saturation. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this report, a self-organizing fuzzy neural network is proposed to control chemical feeding, which is one of the most important problems in water treatment process. In the case of the learning according to raw water quality, the self-organizing fuzzy network, which can be driven by plant operator, is very effective, Simulation results of the proposed method using the data of water treatment plant show good performance. This algorithm is included to chemical feeder, which is composed of PLC, magnetic flow-meter and control valve, so the intelligent control of chemical feeding is realized.

As an information technology is developed, more intelligent system considering emotional factor for implementing the personality is required. In this paper, Reactive Learning Inference System considering emotional factor is proposed. Emotional Facter(E) is defined for a criterion for representing the personal preference. This system is designed to have functions of Reactive filtering by Emotional factor, Incremental learning, perception & inference and knowledge retrieval. This system is applied to the area for analysis of customer's tastes and its performance is analyzed and compared.

Automated container terminals have been developed over the world years and many countries are interested in them because the amount of containers exported or imported is rapidly increasing. The conventional container terminals were not designed to handle this kind of heavily many containers. They would face many structural problems soon or later, although they have been managed to do well so far. One of the most important things in automated container terminal is the handing equipments able to transfer many containers efficiently. Those are maybe automated transfer cranes, automatic guided vehicles and automated quay-side cranes. The word 'automated' means the equipment is operated without drivers and those equipments are able to work without any interruption in working schedule. Through the researches on the conventional transfer cranes, we decided that the structure of conventional transfer cranes is not proper in automated container terminal and it is not possible to handle so many container in limited time. Therefore we have been studying on the proper structure of the automated container for past several years and a new type of transfer cranes has been developed. Design concept and control method of the new crane are introduced and experimental results are presented in this paper.his paper.