• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2000.11c
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• pp.607-612
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• 2000

Microprecision agriculture for a fully controlled plant factory is proposed in this paper. Microprecision agriculture can be attained by using plant factories to realize profitable alternative agriculture. A closed, fully controlled, plant-growing factory is far better in terms of minimizing all sorts of waste. The limit and optimum design concept has to be applied to establish an economically feasible, fully controlled, plant-growing factory. To achieve this objective, microprecision technologies have to be developed. Microprecision technologies should be involved in sensing, modeling, controlling, and collecting information for the mechatronics for plant production. Basic technologies for microprecision are already available; they are SPA (speaking plant approach to environmental control), AI (artificial intelligence: expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, photosynthetic algorithms etc.), bioinstrumentation, non-invasive measurement, biomechatronics, and biorobotics. A microprecision irrigation system for plug production is an example of a microprecision technology that has actually been implemented in a plug seedling production factory.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.34-42
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• 2009

Rodents, specially rats, can recognize distance and shape of an object and also pattern of the textures by using their whiskers. Mechanoreceptors surrounding the root of whisker in their follicle measure deflection of the whisker. Rats can move their whisker back and forth freely. This ability, called active whisking or active sensing, is one of characteristics of rat behaviours. Many researches based on the mechanism have been progressed. In this paper, we test a simple and accurate method based on deflection of the whisker: we designed biomimetic whiskers modeling after a structure of follicle using the microphone. The microphone sensor measures a mechanical vibration. Attaching an artificial whisker beam to the microphone membrane, we can detect a vibration of whisker and this can show the deflection amount of whisker indirectly.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2001

The recent spread of scaled telemanipulation into microsurgery and the nano-world increasingly requires the identification of the possible operation region as a main system specification. A teleoperation system is a complex cascaded system since the human operator, master, slave, and communication are involved bilaterally. Hence, a small time delay inside a master and slave system can be critical to the overall system stability even without communication time delay. In this paper we derive an upper bound of the scaling product of position and force by using Llewellyns unconditional stability. This bound can be used for checking the validity of the designed bilateral controller. Time delay from the sample and hold of computer control and its effects on stability of scaled teleoperation are modeled and simulated based on the transfer function of the teleoperation system. The feasible operation region in terms of position and force scaling decreases sharply as the sampling rate decreases and time delays inside the master and slave increase.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.55-60
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• 2010

Rodents can recognize objects by using their whiskers. Not only rodents but also mammals use their whiskers to recognize objects. However, rodents can discriminate surface roughness in micrometer resolution throughout their whisker sensing. Rats can distinguish an target object's shape, roughness and surface pattern by moving their whisker back and forth freely. Mechanoreceptors surrounding the whisker in their follicle measure deflection and vibration of the whisker. In this paper, we designed biomimetic whiskers modeling rodent whiskers and showed the characteristic properties to extract the information of surface roughness.