Traditional ankle rehabilitation procedures are tedious, repetitive, and require therapist's help. Therefore, they do not provide patients with good motivation to actively participate in the rehabilitation exercises. In addition, objective diagnosis and evaluation of the treatment progress have been difficult because records of exercise history are made by passive instruments from time to time. The virtual reality technology can make these procedures more fun so that patients can perform everyday rehabilitation exercises more actively. Moreover, haptics technology can give active resistance to the patients ankle motion to improve strength of muscles as well as can record ankle's motion and force histories for objective diagnosis and evaluation. This paper summarizes development of a virtual environment fur reforming the conventional ankle rehabilitation procedures. First of all, conventional rehabilitation procedures have been summarized. Secondly, haptic design and control, user interface design, virtual environment contents design are described. Lastly, mutual cooperation among many developers including medical doctors and therapists and future works are commented.

A virtual force is generated and fed back to the operator to make the teleoperation more reliable, which reflects the relationship between a slave robot and an uncertain remote environment as a form of an impedance. In general, for the teleoperation, the teleoperated mobile robot takes pictures of the remote environment and sends the visual information back to the operator over the Internet. Because of the limitations of communication bandwidth and narrow view-angles of camera, it is not possible to watch certain regions, for examples, the shadow and curved areas. To overcome this problem, a virtual force is generated according to both the distance between the obstacle and the robot and the approaching velocity of the obstacle w.r.t the collision vector based on the ultrasonic sensor data. This virtual force is transferred back to the master (two degrees of freedom joystick) over the Internet to enable a human operator to estimate the position of obstacle at the remote site. By holding this master, in spite of limited visual information, the operator can feel the spatial sense against the remote environment. It is demonstrated by experiments that this collision vector based haptic reflection improves the performance of teleoperated mobile robot significantly.

As one of the Principal modalities of human sensation, tactile feel is prerequisite for building wide variety of applications such as telemanipulation, virtual reality and medical engineering. A dynamic Braille display device based on a polymer actuator is presented. The actuator, often called artificial muscle actuator has advantageous features over the existing methods in terms of intrinsic softness, ease of fabrication, cost-effectiveness and miniaturization. The principles of actuation with dielectric elastomer is introduced, and necessary considerations on the design of a tactile display device are discussed. The design of the device is described in detail including the fabrication process and driving electronics. Also, preliminary results of experiments are given to evaluate its performance.

A hybrid stabilization approach involving both Passivity Observer/passivity Controller and wave variables is addressed to stabilize the teleoperation system with time delay. To guarantee the stability of master or slave side, Passivity Observer and Passivity Controller are applied. But Passivity Observer and Passivity Controller technique cannot deal with communication delay and even small communication delay cause the system to be unstable. To cope with this problem, wave variables are additionally employed to have robustness to arbitrary delays. To show the validity of our proposed approach, several computer simulation results are illustrated.

This paper proposes a nonlinear virtual coupling fur haptic interface, which offers better performance while maintaining stability of the system. The nonlinear virtual coupling is designed based on a human response model. This human response model exploits delay between the human Intention and the actual change of arm impedance. The proposed approach provides with less conservative constraints for the design of stable haptic interface, compared with the traditional passivity condition. This allows increased performance that is verified through experiments.

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the asymptotic stability region(ASR) of uncertain variable structure systems with bounded controllers. Using linear matrix inequalities(LMIs) we estimate the ASR and show the exponential stability of the closed-loop control system in the estimated ASR. We give a simple LMI-based algorithm to get estimates of the ASR. We also give a synthesis algorithm to design a switching surface which will make the estimated ASR big. Finally, we give numerical examples in order to show that our method can give better results than the previous ones for a certain class of uncertain variable structure systems with bounded controllers.

We have fabricated the two-dimensional inverted pendulum system and designed its controller. The two-dimensional inverted pendulum system, which is composed of X-Y table, is actuated through timing belt by each of two geared DC motors. And the control goal is that the rod is always kept to a vertical position to any distrubance and is quickly moved to the desired position. Because this system has generally nonlinear dynamic characteristics and X-axis and Y-axis move together, it is very difficult to find its exact mathematical model and to design its controller. Therefore, we have designed the PID controller with simple structure and excellent performance. Genetic algorithm(GA), which is blown as one of probabilistic searching methods, and human's heuristic control strategy are introduced to design an optimal PID controller. The usefulness of the proposed GA based PID coefficient searching technique is verified through the experiments and computer simulations.

This paper proposes a simple compensation scheme for the time delay caused by measurement, calculation and selection of voltage vector in Direct Torque Control (DTC) of an induction motor. In general scheme, it is difficult to know the exact delay time, furthermore the delay time can be varied by program routines for calculation and processing of measured data. In this proposed scheme, by applying voltage vector at the beginning of next sampling period, a fixed delay time is achieved and its compensation becomes much simpler. Furthermore, with the simple compensation algorithm, an improved performance can be achieved by shortening sampling period. Experimental results prove the feasibility of the proposed scheme in induction motor control.

We presents an edge-based point correlation algorithm for fast and stable visual inspection system. Conventional algorithms based on NGC(normalized gray-level correlation) have to overcome some difficulties in applying automated inspection systems to real factory environment. First of all, NGC algorithms involve highly complex computation and thus require high performance hardware for realtime process. In addition, lighting condition in realistic factory environments is not stable and therefore intensity variation from uncontrolled lights gives many troubles for applying NGC directly as pattern matching algorithm. We propose an algorithm to solve these problems, using thinned and binarized edge data, which are obtained from the original image. A point correlation algorithm with the thinned edges is introduced with image pyramid technique to reduce the computational complexity. Matching edges instead of using original gray-level image pixels overcomes problems in NGC method and pyramid of edges also provides fast and stable processing. All proposed methods are proved by the experiments using real images.

PLC (Power Line Communication) is the communication method using the existing power line installed in houses and offices to convert and transmit high frequency communication signal from tens of KHz to tens of MHz, and receive the filtered signal using high frequency filter The advantage of PLC is that PLC uses the existing power line installed in houses and offices so it does not require separate power line. Easy and convenient access using electric outlets is another advantage of PLC. However, PLC has some disadvantages such as limited transmission power, high load interference and noise, variable signal attenuation, characteristic of impedance, and selective possibility of frequency property. We designed the boiler temperature control system unit by using the PLC modem. We can avoid unnecessary heating of separate temperature control unit, and save the cost accordingly control stability of the proposed system is proven through the experiment.