Digital redesign is yet another efficient tool to convert a pre-designed analog controller into a sampled-data one to maintain the analog closed-loop performance in the sense of state matching. A rising difficulty in developing a digital redesign technique for trackers with time-varying references is the unavailability of a closed-form discrete-time model of a system, even if it is linear time-invariant. A way to resolve this is to approximate the time-varying reference as a piecewise constant one, which deteriorates the state matching performance. Another remedy may be to decrease a sampling period, which however could numerically destabilize the optimization-based digital redesign condition. In this paper, we develop a digital redesign condition for time-varying trackers by approximating the time-varying reference through a triangular hold and by introducing delta-operated discrete-time models. It is shown that the digitally redesigned sampled-data tracker recovers the performance of the pre-designed analog tracker under a fast sampling limit. Simulation results on the formation flying of satellites convincingly show the effectiveness of the development.

Almost all of control methods proposed so far have been designed such that the overall system guarantees asymptotic stability. It implies that the output converges to zero but not reaches to zero in a finite time. In many actual cases, however, it is preferable to design the controller such that the output gets to zero in a finite time. In this paper, we proposed a novel elliptical sliding surface. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, experimental results are given.

In this paper, we propose an output feedback controller for a chain of integrators system compensating measurement noise of feedback sensor. Measurement noise makes feedback signals distorted, and results in performance degradation or even system failure. Therefore, we need to design a robust controller to accommodate the possible measurement noise in the feedback information. Our controller is equipped with a gain-scaling factor to reject or minimize the effect of measurement noise in output feedback information. We give a theoretical analysis of the controlled system and illustrate the improved control performance via an example.

In an oligopolistic market, only a few firms account for most or all of total production, e.g., automobile, steel, and computer industries. For a dynamic oligopolistic market with two firms competing in quantities, we show that supervisory control theory of discrete event systems provides a novel approach to solve the dynamic oligopoly problem with the aim of maximizing the profits of both firms. Specifically, we show that the controllability, observability, and nonblocking property (which are the core concepts in supervisory control theory) are the necessary and sufficient conditions for two oligopolistic firms in disequilibrium to eventually reach equilibrium states of maximizing the profits of both firms.

Multi-axle driving vehicles that are used in special environments require high driving performance, steering performance, and stability. Among these vehicles, 6WS/6WD vehicles with middle wheels have structural safety by distributing the load and reducing the pitch angle during rapid acceleration and braking. 6WS/6WD vehicles are favored for military use in off road operations because of their high maneuverability and mobility on extreme terrains and obstacles. 6WD vehicles that using in-wheel motor can generate the independent wheel torque without other mechanical parts. Conventional vehicles, however, cannot generate an opposite driving force at each side wheel. Using an independent steering and driving system, six-wheel vehicles can show better performance than conventional vehicles. Using of independent steering and driving system, the 6 wheel vehicle can improve a performance better than conventional vehicle. This vehicle enhances the maneuverability under low speed and the stability at high speed. This paper describes an independent 6WS/6WD vehicle, consists of three parts; Vehicle Model, Control Algorithm for 6WS/6WD and Simulation. First, vehicle model is application of TruckSim software for 6WS and 6WD. Second, control algorithm describes the optimum tire force distribution method in view of energy saving. Last is simulation and verification.

This paper proposes an equipment and an algorithm for modeling the magnetic force of electromagnets in magnetic levitation systems. We assume that the magnetic force model is represented in terms of a 2D lookup table. The 2D lookup table is constructed by applying noncausal filtering and interpolation to data measured by the proposed modeling equipment. The proposed modeling equipment is designed such that it can measure the magnetic force exerted on the levitation object while it changes the voltage applied to the electromagnet and position of the levitation object. The algorithm of making a 2D lookup table has two stages. The data measured by the proposed modeling equipment is smoothed by a noncausal filter and then the 2D lookup table is obtained by interpolating filtered data. The proposed modeling method has advantages of time-saving, model consistency, and chance of automation for mass production. We show the validity of proposed method through control experiments.

GPU (Graphics Processing Units) is consists of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) architecture and provides fast parallel processing. A GA (Genetic Algorithm), which requires large computations, is implemented in GPU using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). Three kinds of execution models are presented according to different combinations of processing modules in GPU. Comparison experiments between GPU models and CPU are tested for a couple of benchmark problems by variation of population sizes and complexity of problem sizes.

In this paper, we introduce software development process for autonomous mobile robot with LEGO RCX. The software is designed from course analysis and a series of software design processes are applied for the development. Various control methods are devised to identify robot's location and to optimize the running strategy. To assure realtime property and reliability of the software, we adopted software engineering processes during the development. In this paper, we report the detailed software design processes and the implementation result that we have experienced with our practical LEGO robot platform.

This paper presents a system of road extraction for traffic images from a single camera. The road in the images is subject to large changes in appearance because of environmental effects. The proposed system is based on the integration of color correlograms and random forest. The color correlogram depicts the color properties of an image properly. Using the random forest, road extraction is formulated as a learning paradigm. The combined effects of color correlograms and random forest create a robust system capable of extracting the road in very changeable situations.

A precise embedded ultrasonic localization system is developed for autonomous mobile robots in indoor environments, which is essential for autonomous navigation of mobile robots with various tasks. Although ultrasonic sensors are more cost-effective than other sensors such as LRF (Laser Range Finder) and vision, they suffer inaccuracy and directional ambiguity. First, we apply the matched filter to measure the distance precisely. For resolving the computational complexity of the matched filter for embedded systems, we propose a new matched filter algorithm with fast computation in three points of view. Second, we propose an accurate ultrasonic localization system which consists of three ultrasonic receivers on the mobile robot and two or more transmitters on the ceiling. Last, we add an extended Kalman filter to estimate position and orientation. Various simulations and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed system.

The collision-free path of a manipulator should be regenerated in the real time to achieve collision safety when obstacles or humans come into the workspace of the manipulator. A probabilistic roadmap (PRM) method, one of the popular path planning schemes for a manipulator, can find a collision-free path by connecting the start and goal poses through the roadmap constructed by drawing random nodes in the free configuration space. The path planning method based on the configuration space shows robust performance for static environments which can be converted into the off-line processing. However, since this method spends considerable time on converting dynamic obstacles into the configuration space, it is not appropriate for real-time generation of a collision-free path. On the other hand, the method based on the workspace can provide fast response even for dynamic environments because it does not need the conversion into the configuration space. In this paper, we propose an efficient real-time path planning by combining the PRM and the potential field methods to cope with static and dynamic environments. The PRM can generate a collision-free path and the potential field method can determine the configuration of the manipulator. A series of experiments show that the proposed path planning method can provide robust performance for various obstacles.

This paper proposes a robot control human interface using Markov model (HMM) based hand signal recognizer. The command receiving humanoid robot sends webcam images to a client computer. The client computer then extracts the intended commanding hum n's hand motion descriptors. Upon the feature acquisition, the hand signal recognizer carries out the recognition procedure. The recognition result is then sent back to the robot for responsive actions. The system performance is evaluated by measuring the recognition of '48 hand signal set' which is created randomly using fundamental hand motion set. For isolated motion recognition, '48 hand signal set' shows 97.07% recognition rate while the 'baseline hand signal set' shows 92.4%. This result validates the proposed hand signal recognizer is indeed highly discernable. For the '48 hand signal set' connected motions, it shows 97.37% recognition rate. The relevant experiments demonstrate that the proposed system is promising for real world human-robot interface application.

This paper deals with the improvement of visual path following through velocity variation according to the coordinate of feature points. Visual path follow first teaches driving path by selecting milestone images then follows the route by comparing the milestone image and current image. We follow the visual path following algorithm of Chen and Birchfield [8]. In [8], they use fixed translational and rotational velocity. We propose an algorithm that uses different translational velocity according to the driving condition. Translational velocity is adjusted according to the variation of the coordinate of feature points on image. Experimental results including diverse indoor cases show the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, a LBCC (Latter Bank Cooling Control) for the high strength steel is proposed to obtain the desirable temperature and the property of the material along the longitudinal direction of the steel on the ROT (Run-Out Table) process. A cooling valve is modeled to analyze the response of the ROT banks. The control concept is derived from a field data, a valve model considering the valve response and a TTT (Time-Temperature Transformation) diagram. The proposed control is verified from the simulation results under the various carbon quantities. It is shown through the field test of the hot strip mill that the deviation of the CT (Coiling Temperature) is considerably decreased by the proposed temperature control.

Sun tracking system is the most important subsystem in parabolic dish type solar thermal power plant, since it determines the amount of thermal energy to be collected, thus affects the efficiency of solar thermal power plant most significantly. Various types of sun tracking systems are currently used. Among them, use of photo sensors to located the sun(which is called sensor type) and use of astronomical algorithm to compute the sun position(which is called program type) are two of the mostly used methods. Recently some uses CCD sensor, like CCD camera, which is called image processing type sun tracking system. This work is concerned with the analysis of sun tracking performance of various types of sun tracking systems currently used in the parabolic dish type solar thermal power plant. We first developed a sun tracking error measurement system. Then, we evaluate the performance of five different types of sun tracking systems, sensor type, program type, hybrid type(use of sensor and computed sun position simultaneously), tracking error compensated program type and image processing type. Experimentally obtained data shows that the tracking error compensated program type sun tracking system is very effective and could provide a good sun tracking performance. Also the data obtained shows that the performance of sensor type sun tracking system is being affected by the cloud significantly, while the performance of a program type sun tracking system is being affected by the sun tracking system's mechanical and installation errors very much. Finally image processing type sun tracking system can provide accurate sun tracking performance, but costs more and requires more computational time.