This paper is focused on a robust saturation controller for the stable linear time-invariant (LTI) system involving both actuator's saturation and structured real parameter uncertainties. Based on affine quadratic stability and multi-convexity concept, a robust saturation controller is newly proposed and the linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based sufficient existence conditions for this controller are presented. The controller suggested in this paper can analytically prescribe the lower and upper bounds of parameter uncertainties, and guarantee the closed-loop robust stability of the system in the presence of actuator's saturation. Through numerical simulations, it is confirmed that the proposed robust saturation controller is robustly stable with respect to parameter uncertainties over the prescribed range defined by the lower and upper bounds.

In this paper, we propose a method to design variable structure systems with sliding sector for multi-input multi-output systems with mismatched uncertainties in the state matrix. For the uncertain systems we define sliding sectors within which a norm of the state decreases with zero input despite of mismatched uncertainties. Using the notion of the sliding sector we give simple design algorithms of variable structure control laws that can reduce the chattering. Finally, we give a design example in order to show the effectiveness of our method.

DSP chip parameters of a digital hearing aid (HA) should be optimally selected or fitted for hearing impaired persons. The more precise parameter fitting guarantees the better compensation of the hearing loss (HL). Digital HAs adopt DSP chips for more precise fitting of various HL threshold curve patterns. A specific DSP chip such as Gennum GB3211 was designed and manufactured in order to match up to about 4.7 billion different possible HL cases with combination of 7 limited parameters. This paper deals with a digital HA fitting program which is developed for optimal fitting of GB3211 DSP chip parameters. The fitting program has completed features from audiogram input to DSP chip interface. The compensation effects of the microphone and the receiver are also included. The paper shows some application examples.

The Air Quality Sensor(AQS), located near the fresh air inlet, serves to reduce the amount of pollution entering the vehicle cabin through the HVAC(heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) system by sending a signal to close the fresh air inlet door/ventilation flap when the vehicle enters a high pollution area. The sensor module which includes two independent sensing elements for responding to diesel and gasoline exhaust gases, and temperature sensor and humidity sensor was designed for intelligent AQS in automobile. With this sensor module, AVR microcontroller was designed with back propagation neural network to a powerful gas/vapor pattern recognition when the motor vehicles pass a pollution area. Momentum back propagation algorithm was used in this study instead of normal backpropagation to reduce the teaming time of neural network. The signal from neural network was modified to control the inlet of automobile and display the result or alarm the situation in this study. One chip microcontroller, ATmega 128L(ATmega Ltd., USA) was used for the control and display. And our developed system can intelligently reduce the malfunction of AQS from the dampness of air or dense fog with the backpropagation neural network and the input sensor module with four sensing elements such as reducing gas sensing element, oxidizing gas sensing element, temperature sensing element and humidity sensing element.

This paper studies digital control of biodynamic model of HIV-1 via intelligent digital redesign (IDR). The purpose of the IDR is to develop an equivalent digital fuzzy controller maintaining the satisfactory performance of an existing continuous-time fuzzy controller in the sense of the state-matching. Some conditions for the stability as well as the global state-matching are provided.. They are given by the form of the linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and thereby easily tractable by the convex optimization techniques. The main features of the proposed method are that 1) the generalized control scheme is provided for the multirate as well as the single-rate digital controllers; 2) a new compensated block-pulse function method is applied to closely match the states of the continuous-time and the sampled-data fuzzy systems in the discrete-time domain; 3) the two-step procedure of IDR is presented to prevent the performance degradation caused by the additional stability conditions. The applicability of the proposed approach is shown through the biodynamic model of HIV-1.

In this paper, we propose the topological map building method about unknown environment using the ultrasonic sensors. An ultrasonic sensor inherently has the range error due to the specular reflection. To decrease this error, we estimate the obstacle states(position and velocity) using the local minimum sensor values and Jacobian. Estimated states are used to avoid the obstacles and build the topological map similar to the type that human being memorizes an environment. When a mobile robot is faced with three problems(comer way, cross way and dead end), it senses the movable directions using FIS(Fuzzy Inference System). Among these directions, it can select the target direction using binary decision tree(Turn Side Selector). Proposed algorithm has been verified with three simulations and three implementations.

This paper deals with a fuzzy controller using IA(Immune Algorithm) for Trajectory Tracking of 2-DOF WMR(Wheeled Mobile Robot). The global inputs to the WMR are reference position and reference velocity, which are time variables. The global output of WMR is a current position. The tracking controller makes position error to be converged 0. In order to reduce position error, a compensation velocities on the track of trajectory is necessary. Therefore, a FIAC(Fuzzy-IA controller) is proposed to give velocity compensation in this system. Input variables of fuzzy part are position errors in every sampling time. The output values of fuzzy part are compensation velocities. IA are implemented to adjust the scaling factor of fuzzy part. The computer simulation is performed to get the result of trajectory tracking and to prove efficiency of proposed controller.

This paper presents the device of recognizing image of the studded paving blocks, transmitting, the information by vibration to a visually handicapped person. Usually the blind uses the walking stick to recognize the studded paving block. This research uses a PCA (Principal Component Analysis) based image processing approach for recognizing the paving blocks. We classify the studded paving blocks into 5 classes, that is, vertical line block, right-declined line block, left-declined line block, dotted block and flat block. The 8 images for each of 5 classes are captured for each block by 112*120 pixels, then the eigenvectors are obtained in magnitude order of eigenvectors by using principal component analysis. The principal components for images can be calculated using projection of transformation matrix composed of eigenvectors. The classification has been executed using Euclidean's distance, so the block having minimum distance with a image is chosen as matched one. The result of classification is transmitted to the blind by electric vibration signals with different magnitudes and frequencies.

Most of the recently developed robots are human friendly robots which imitate an animal or human such as entertainment robot, biomimetic robot and humanoid robot. Interest in these robots is increased because the social trend is focused on health, welfare, and graying. By these social backgrounds, robots become more human friendly and suitable or home or personal environment. The more biomimetic robots resemble living creature, the more human feels familiarity. Human feels close friendship not only when feeding a pet, but also when watching a pet having the food. Most of entertainment robots and pet robots use internal-type batteries and have a self-recharging function. Entertainment robots and pet robots with internal-type batteries are not able to operate during charging the battery. So far there have been a few robots that do not depend on an internal battery. However, they need a bulky energy conversion unit and a slug or foods as an energy source, which is not suitable for home or personal application. In this paper, we introduce a new biomimetic entertainment robot with autonomous eating functionality, called EPRO-1(Eating Pet RObot version 1). The EPRO-1 is able to eat a food (a small battery), by itself and evacuate. We describe the design concept of the autonomous eating mechanism of the EPRO-1, characteristics of sub-parts of the manufactured mechanism and its control system.

Material information for environment may be useful to accomplish mobile robot localization. A procedure to classify a set of indoor materials (glass, steel, wood, aluminum and concrete) with the reflected signal of ultrasonic sensor is proposed in this paper. The main idea is to use material-specific reflection characteristics for the recognition of material type. To achieve the classification task, we modeled reflected signal as a maximum amplitude with respect to distance. In this way, we can generate echo signal models for the given materials and these models are used to compare with the current sensor reading. The experimental results show that the proposed method may give material information during map building task of mobile robot.

In this paper, we propose a vision-based simultaneous localization and map-building (SLAM) algorithm. SLAM problem asks the location of mobile robot in the unknown environments. Therefore, this problem is one of the most important processes of mobile robots in the outdoor operation. To solve this problem, Extended Kalman filter (EKF) is widely used. However, this filter requires computational power (${\sim}O(N)$, N is the dimension of state vector). To reduce the computational complexity, we applied compressed extended Kalman filter (CEKF) to stereo image sequence. Moreover, because the mobile robots operate in the outdoor environments, we should estimate full d.o.f.s of mobile robot. To evaluate proposed SLAM algorithm, we performed the outdoor experiments. The experiment was performed by using new wheeled type mobile robot, Robhaz-6W. The performance results of CEKF SLAM are presented.

In this paper an anthropomorphic robot hand called SKKU Hand IIl is presented, which has a miniaturized fingertip tactile sensor. The thumb is designed as one part of the palm and multiplies the mobility of the palm. The fingertip tactile sensor, based on polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and pressure variable resistor ink, is physically flexible enough to be deformed into any three-dimensional geometry. In order to detect incipient slip, a PVDF strip is arranged along the direction normal to the surface of the finger of the robot hand. Also, a thin flexible sensor to sense the static force as well as the contact location is fabricated into an arrayed type using pressure variable resistor ink. The driving circuits and the tactile sensing systems for the SKKU Hand II are embedded in the hand. Each driving circuit communicates with others using CAN protocol. SKKU Hand II is manufactured and its feasibility is validated through preliminary experiments.

For the effective operation of manufacturing system, FMS(Flexible Manufacturing System) and CIM(Computer Integrated Manufacturing) system are developed. In these systems, a machine tool is the target of integration in last 3 decades. In nowadays, the conventional concept of machine tools is changing to the autonomous manufacturing device based on knowledge-evolution through applying advanced information technology in which open architecture controller, high speed network and internet technology are contained. In this environment, a machine tool is not the target of integration but the subject of cooperation. In the future, a machine tool will be more improved in the form of a knowledge-evolution based device. In order to develop the knowledge-evolution based machine tools, this paper proposes the structure of knowledge evolution in M2M(Machine To Machine) and the scheme of a dialogue agent among agent-based modules such as a sensory module, a dialogue module, and an expert system. The dialogue agent has a role of interfacing with another machine for cooperation. To design the dialogue agent module in M2M environment, FIPA-OS and ping agent based on FIPA-OS are analyzed in this study. Through this, it is expected that the dialogue agent module can be more efficiently designed and the knowledge-evolution based machine tools can be hereafter more easily implemented.

Any input acceleration that bends RLG dithering axis causes flexure error, which is a source of the noncommutative error that can not be compensated by simply using integrated gyro sensor output. This paper introduces noncommutative error equations that define attitude errors caused by flexure errors. In this paper, flexure error is classified as sensor level error if the sensing axis coincides with the dithering axis and as system level error if the two axes do not coincide. The relationship between gyro output and the rotation vector is introduced and is used to define the coordinate transformation matrix and angular motion. Equations are derived for both sensor level and system level flexure error analysis. These equations show that RLG based INS attitude error caused by flexure is directly proportional to time, amount of input acceleration and the dynamic frequency of the vehicle.

Today the automobile has been changed from a mechanical system to an electronic control system fly the development of the electronic technology. In the automobile body, most of these electronic control devices are networked and managed fully by the CAN protocol. But, when a network system is overloaded, unexpected transmission delay for relative low priority objects occurs due to the static priority definition of the CAN protocol. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a dynamic precedence queue mechanism that creates a queue for the low priority object and its relevant objects to be transmitted, which becomes urgent in an overloaded network system to keep the maximum allowable time delay. For the generated queue, the highest priority is assigned to transmit the queued objects within the shortest time. The mechanism is implemented in the logical link layer of CAN, which does not require any modification of the old CAN hardware. Effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is verified by the real experiments with an automobile network system.