• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.711-717
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• 2014

Global path planning for autonomous driving of unmanned ground vehicle is essential. When setting global path planning, its accuracy and effectiveness is increased if useful information such as terrain type of driving route has been reflected on global path planning. As a method to reflect the terrain type, there is a method to perform global path planning by applying the weight to each terrain type. At this time, how to assign appropriate weights corresponding to the terrain type is more important than anything. In this paper, we proposed a method to determine the weight for terrain type that may affect the results of global path planning. Moreover, we presented effective operation method and design results(GUI) to check the possibility of the use of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.55-59
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• 2008

For effective mobility control of UGV(unmanned ground vehicle), the terrain cover classification is an important component as well as terrain geometry recognition and obstacle detection. The vision based terrain cover classification algorithm consists of pre-processing, feature extraction, classification and post-processing. In this paper, we present a method to classify terrain covers based on the color and texture information. The color space conversion is performed for the pre-processing, the wavelet transform is applied for feature extraction, and the SVM(support vector machine) is applied for the classifier. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a promising classification performance.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.180-187
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• 2010

In this paper, a GNSS-based AGV system was designed, and steering tested on a golf cart using electric wires in order to confirm the control efficiency of the low speed vehicle which used only position information of GNSS. After analyzed the existing AGVs system, we developed controller and steering algorithm using GNSS based position information. To analyze the performance of the developed controller and steering algorithm, straight-type and circle-type trajectory test are executed. The results show that steering performance of GNSS-based AGV system is ${\pm}\;0.2m$ for a reference trajectory.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.711-720
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• 2015

Recently many studies of Radar systems mounted on ground vehicles for autonomous driving, SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) and collision avoidance have been reported. Since several pixels per an object may be generated in a close-range radar application, a width of an object can be estimated automatically by various signal processing techniques. In this paper, we tried to attempt to develop an algorithm to estimate obstacle width using Radar images. The proposed method consists of 5 steps - 1) background clutter reduction, 2) local peak pixel detection, 3) region growing, 4) contour extraction and 5)width calculation. For the performance validation of our method, we performed the test width estimation using a real data of two cars acquired by commercial radar system - I200 manufactured by Navtech. As a result, we verified that the proposed method can estimate the widths of targets.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.187-191
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• 2012

This paper deals with a safe climbing path planning for unmanned automatic vehicles. Unlike the existing path planning schemes, the safety is the highest priority for our approach. To achieve this, the global potential field which includes a dangerous zone as well a given terrain information is generated, and the way-points are determined by using image processing such as the erosion operation. The proposed method can reduce the computation effort and the amount of information, and provide the safe climbing path which is similar to human's intuition.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.894-902
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• 2010

This paper presents a vision-based robust off-road terrain classification method against environmental variation. As a supervised classification algorithm, we applied a neural network classifier using wavelet features extracted from wavelet transform of an image. In order to get over an effect of overall image feature variation, we adopted environment sensors and gathered the training parameters database according to environmental conditions. The robust terrain classification algorithm against environmental variation was implemented by choosing an optimal parameter using environmental information. The proposed algorithm was embedded on a processor board under the VxWorks real-time operating system. The processor board is containing four 1GHz 7448 PowerPC CPUs. In order to implement an optimal software architecture on which a distributed parallel processing is possible, we measured and analyzed the data delivery time between the CPUs. And the performance of the present algorithm was verified, comparing classification results using the real off-road images acquired under various environmental conditions in conformity with applied classifiers and features. Experiments show the robustness of the classification results on any environmental condition.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.27 no.10
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• pp.52-60
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• 2010

It is generally important to get a precise position information for autonomous unmanned vehicle(AUV) to run safely. For getting the position of AUV, the GPS has been using to navigation in a vehicle. Though it is useful to finding a position, it is difficult to precisely control a trajectory of the AUV due to large measuring error which may reach over 10 meters. Therefore to apply AUV it needs to compensate for the error. This paper proposes a method to more precisely localize AUV using three low-cost differential global positioning systems (DGPS). The distance errors between each DGPS are minimized as using the least square method (LSM) and the Kalman filter to eliminate a Gaussian white noise. The selected DGPS is cheaper and easier to set up than the RTK-GPS. It is also more precise than the general GPS. The proposed method can compensate the relatively position error according to stationary and moving distance of the AUV. For evaluating the algorithm by simulation, the DGPS signal with the Gaussian white noise to any points is generated by the AR model and compared with the measurement signal. It is confirmed that the proposed method can effectively compensate the position error as comparing with the measurement signal. The compensated position signal can be used to localize and control the AUV in the road.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.75-81
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• 2012

This study is to design the transmitter and receiver of short range UWB(Ultra Wide Band) imaging radar that is able to display high resolution radar image for front area of a UGV(Unmanned Ground Vehicle). This radar can help a UGV to navigate autonomously as it detects and avoids obstacles through foliage. The transmitter needs two transmitters to improve the azimuth resolution. Multi-channel receivers are required to synthesize radar image. Transmitter consists of high power amplifier, channel selection switch, and waveform generator. Receiver is composed of sixteen channel receivers, receiver channel converter, and frequency down converter, Before manufacturing it, the proposed architecture of transceiver is proved by modeling and simulation using several parameters. Then, it was manufactured by using industrial RF(Radio Frequency) components and all other measured parameters in the specification were satisfied as well.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.1054-1062
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• 2011

This study describes the time domain imaging algorithm which can be well applied to short-range UWB(ultra wideband) bistatic radar. In the imaging method of SAR technology, the frequency domain method is well applied to the areas which satisfy far-field condition. However in the near-field environment, the image quality is not good due to phase error. However back-projection method based on time domain is well applied to short-range imaging radar. Meanwhile because its processing time is very long, real time-processing is very difficult. To resolve this problem FFBP(Fast Factorized Back-Projection) was proposed. Using the raw data gathered on field we implemented back-projection and FFBP method. Then image quality and processing time were analyzed using these methods.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2017.05a
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• pp.279-282
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• 2017

Kinect depth sensor, a depth camera developed by Microsoft as a natural user interface for game appeared as a very useful tool in computer vision field. In this paper, due to kinect's depth sensor and its high frame rate, we developed a distance measurement system using Kinect camera to test it for unmanned vehicles which need vision systems to perceive the surrounding environment like human do in order to detect objects in their path. Therefore, kinect depth sensor is used to detect objects in its field of view and enhance the distance measurement system from objects to the vision sensor. Detected object is identified in accuracy way to determine if it is a real object or a pixel nose to reduce the processing time by ignoring pixels which are not a part of a real object. Using depth segmentation techniques along with Open CV library for image processing, we can identify present objects within Kinect camera's field of view and measure the distance from them to the sensor. Tests show promising results that this system can be used as well for autonomous vehicles equipped with low-cost range sensor, Kinect camera, for further processing depending on the application type when they reach a certain distance far from detected objects.