It is possible to obtain an omnidirectional stereo image via a single camera by using a catadioptric approach with a convex mirror and concave lens. In order to measure three-dimensional distance using the imaging system, the optical parameters of the system are required. In this paper, a calibration procedure to extract the parameters of the imaging system is described. Based on the parameters, experiments are carried out to verify the performance of the three-dimensional distance measurement of a single camera omnidirectional stereo imaging system.

Shape recognition of solder ball bumps in a BGA (Ball Grid Array) is an important issue in flip chip bonding technology. In particular, the semiconductor industry has required faster and more accurate inspection of micron-size solder bumps in flip chip bonding as the density of balls has increased dramatically. The difficulty of this issue comes from specular reflection on the metal ball. Shape recognition of a metal ball is a very realproblem for computer vision systems. Specular reflection of the metal ball appears, disappears, or changes its image abruptly due to tiny movementson behalf of the viewer. This paper presents a practical shape recognition method for three dimensional (3-D) inspection of a BGA using a 5-step ring illumination device. When the ring light illuminates the balls, distinctive specularity images of the balls, which are referred to as "iso-slope contours" in this paper, are shown. By using a mathematical reflectance model, we can drive the 3-D shape information of the ball in aquantitative manner. The experimental results show the usefulness of the method for industrial application in terms of time and accuracy.

In the transportation industry, especially in the shipbuilding process, 3D surface measurement of large-scale hull pieces is needed for fabrication and assembly. We suggest an efficient method for checking the shape of curved plates under the forming operation with short time by measuring 3D profiles along the multi lines of the target surface. For accurate profile reconstruction, 2D camera calibration and 3D calibration using gauge blocks were performed. The evaluation test shows that the measurement accuracy is within the boundary of tolerance required in the shipbuilding process.

AVI (Automatic Vision Inspection) systems automatically detect defect features and measure their sizes via camera vision. AVI systems usually report different measurements on the same defect with some variations on position or rotation mainly because different images are provided. This is caused by possible variations from the image acquisition process including optical factors, nonuniform illumination, random noises, and so on. For this reason, conventional area based defect measuring methods have problems of robustness and consistency. In this paper, we propose a new defect size measuring method to overcome this problem, utilizing volume information that is completely ignored in the area based defect measuring method. The results show that our proposed method dramatically improves the robustness and consistency of defect size measurement.

The three-dimensional measurement method of confocal systems is a spot scanning method which has a high resolution and good illumination efficiency. However, conventional confocal systems had a weak point in that it has to perform XY axis scanning to achieve FOV (Field of View) vision through spot scanning. There are some methods to improve this problem involving the use of a galvano mirror [1], pin-hole array, etc. Therefore, in this paper we propose a method to improve a parallel mode confocal system using a micro-lens and pin-hole array in a dual microscope configuration. We made an area scan possible by using a combination MLA (Micro Lens Array) and pin-hole array, and used an objective lens to improve the light transmittance and signal-to-noise ratio. Additionally, we made it possible to change the objective lens so that it is possible to select a lens considering the reflection characteristic of the measuring object and proper magnification. We did an experiment using 5X, 2.3X objective lens, and did a calibration of height using a VLSI calibration target.

Pick and placement systems need high speeds and reliability for the position alignment process of semiconductor packages in picking up and placing them on placement trays. Image processing is usually adopted for position aligning where finding out the most suitable method is considered most important aspect of the process. This paper proposes a method for judging the performance of different image processing algorithms based on the PCI (Process Capability Index). The PCI is an index which represents the error distribution acquired from many experimental data. The bigger the index, the more reliable the results or the lower the deviation. Two compared and candidate methods are Hough Transform and PCA (Principal Component Analysis), both of which are very suitable for oblong or rectangular type packages such as BGA's. Comparing the two approaches through a CPI with enough experimental results leads to the conclusion that the PCA is much better than the Hough Transform in not only reliability, but also processing speed.

In this paper, we propose a CFWC (CCD and fuzzy PID based width control) scheme to obtain the desired delivery width margin of a vertical rolling mill in hot strip process. A WMS(width measurement system) is composed of two line scan cameras, an edge detection algorithm, a glitch filter, and so on. A dynamic model of the mill is derived from a gauge meter equation in order to design the fuzzy PID controller. The controller is a self-learning structure to select the PID gains from the error and error rate of the width margin. The effectiveness of the proposed CFWC is verified from simulation results under a width disturbance of the entry in the mill. Using a field test, we show that the performance of the width control is improved by the proposed control scheme.

This study proposes an adaptive control algorithm for lateral motion of a UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) using an NN (Neural Networks). The lateral motion of the UGV can be corrupted with various uncertainties such as side slip. In order to compensate the performance degradation of the UGV under various uncertainties, an NN-based adaptive control is designed by utilizing a virtual control concept. Since both the drift and input gain terms are uncertain, the proposed method adapts the whole terms related to the difference between the nominal and real systems. To avoid a singularity problem with the adaptive control, the affine property of the UGV dynamic model is utilized and the overall closed-loop stability is analyzed rigorously. Finally, numerical simulations using Carsim are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In this paper, a simple design of a DOB (Disturbance Observer) for attitude control of a quad-rotor system is presented. A modified DOB structure from the conventional DOB is introduced to eliminate time-delay in the calculation. The proposed simple modification in the DOB configuration provides an efficiency in the calculation of the disturbance term such that the delayed calculation is not required. The performance of the modified DOB is evaluated through simulation studies. To confirm the simulation results, experimental studies of the attitude control of a quad-rotor system are conducted.

Patients have the paralysis of their wrists, and can't use of their wrists freely. But their wrists can be recovered by wrist-bending rehabilitation exercise. Professional rehabilitation therapeutists exercise the wrists of patients in hospital. But the wrists of patients have not exercised enough for the rehabilitation, because the therapeutists are much less than patients in number. Therefore, the wrist rehabilitation robot should be developed, and it have to measure the applied force to the patients' wrists for their safety. In this paper, the four-axis force/moment sensor was designed for the wrist rehabilitation robot. As a test results, the interference error of the four-axis force/moment sensor was less than 0.91%. It is thought that the sensor can be used to measure the applied force to the patients' wrists.

The traffic signal has been widely used in the transport system with a fixed time interval currently. This kind of setting time was determined based on experience for vehicles to generate a waiting time while allowing pedestrians crossing the street. However, this strict setting causes inefficient problems in terms of economic and safety crossing. In this research, we propose a monitoring algorithm to detect, track and check pedestrian crossing the crosswalk by the patterns of behavior. This monitoring system ensures the safety for pedestrian and keeps the traffic flow in efficient. In this algorithm, pedestrians are detected by using HOG feature which is robust to illumination changes in outdoor environment. According to a complex computation, the parallel process with the GPU as well as CPU is adopted for real-time processing. Therefore, pedestrians are tracked by the relationship of hue channel in image sequence according to the predefined pedestrian zone. Finally, the system checks the pedestrians' crossing on the crosswalk by its HOG based behavior patterns. In experiments, the parallel processing by both GPU and CPU was performed so that the result reaches 16 FPS (Frame Per Second). The accuracy of detection and tracking was 93.7% and 91.2%, respectively.

It is well knowns that based on the CSP (Common Spatial Pattern) algorithm, the linear projection of an EEG (Electroencephalography) signal can be made to spaces that optimize the discriminant between two patterns. Sharing disadvantages from linear time invariant systems, CSP suffers from the non-stationary nature of EEGs causing the performance of the classification in a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) system to drop significantly when comparing the training data and test data. The author has suggested a simple idea based on the parallel model of CSP filters to improve the performance of BCI systems. The model was tested with a simple CSP algorithm (without any elaborate regularizing methods) and a perceptron learning algorithm as a classifier to determine the improvement of the system. The simulation showed that the parallel model could improve classification performance by over 10% compared to conventional CSP methods.

This paper proposes a real time lane detection algorithm using LRF (Laser Range Finder) for autonomous navigation of a mobile robot. There are many technologies for safety of the vehicles such as airbags, ABS, EPS etc. The real time lane detection is a fundamental requirement for an automobile system that utilizes outside information of automobiles. Representative methods of lane recognition are vision-based and LRF-based systems. By the vision-based system, recognition of environment for three dimensional space becomes excellent only in good conditions for capturing images. However there are so many unexpected barriers such as bad illumination, occlusions, and vibrations that the vision cannot be used for satisfying the fundamental requirement. In this paper, we introduce a three dimensional lane detection algorithm using LRF, which is very robust against the illumination. For the three dimensional lane detections, the laser reflection difference between the asphalt and lane according to the color and distance has been utilized with the extraction of feature points. Also a stable tracking algorithm is introduced empirically in this research. The performance of the proposed algorithm of lane detection and tracking has been verified through the real experiments.

In this paper, an elderly assistance system is developed based on Xenomai, a real-time development framework cooperating with the Linux kernel. A Kinect sensor is used to recognize the behavior of the elderly and A-star search algorithm is implemented to find the shortest path to the person. The mobile robot also generates a trajectory using a digital convolution operator which is based on a Bezier curve for smooth driving. In order to follow the generated trajectory within the control period, we developed real-time tasks and compared the performance of the tracking trajectory with that of non real-time tasks. The real-time task has a better result on following the trajectory within the physical constraints which means that it is more appropriate to apply to an elderly assistant system.

Smart mobile robot is a kind of Intelligent Robot. It means that operates manipulate autonomously and recognize the external environment. Smart mobile robot moving mechanism has many type and the type depend on the robot shape or purpose. Recently, research on the moving mechanism has been actively in many area. The moving mechanism divided to wheel type, crawler type, walking type, other type and the moving type choose by the kind of robot or the purpose robot. In this paper, describe the kind of moving mechanism on the smart mobile robot and the technical trend of moving mechanism of smart mobile robot.

Recently, many countries have attempted to protect their satellites from damage caused by space debris. To design these collision avoidance maneuvers, optimal algorithms based on numerical simulations are widely used due to their practicality. However, these algorithms often require a great expenditure of time in order to find solutions. Therefore, in this paper, a simple analytical strategy is suggested to find the initial prediction required to find these numerical solutions for collision avoidance maneuvers by using relative dynamics for the rendezvous and docking problems. For this analytical strategy, the simple dynamics on the CW (Clohessy-Wiltshire) frame is adopted as an attempt to introduce an analytical solution.

Heading bias effects in PNS using IMUs attached to shoes are analyzed in this paper. The navigation algorithms of a single foot PNS where one IMU is attached to a foot and dual foot PNSs where two IMUs are attached to each foot are derived. Two navigation algorithms are proposed for the dual foot PNS: 1) the positions from the independent right and left foot PNSs are averaged to provide the final position, 2) the right and left foot PNSs are correlated and it provides positions of each foot. Furthermore, it is proven that two methods are equal. Using the derived navigation algorithms the effect of heading bias caused by a misalignment of the moving direction and IMU is analyzed. The analysis explains the position error of a single foot PNS is diverged while the heading bias is effectively compensated in dual foot PNSs because of the symmetry of heading biases. The experimental results confirm the analysis.