• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.785-798
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• 2004

This paper introduces the development of a range sensor based integrated navigation system for a multi-functional indoor service robot, called PSR (Public Service Robot System). The proposed navigation system includes hardware integration for sensors and actuators, the development of crucial navigation algorithms like mapping, localization, and path planning, and planning scheme such as error/fault handling. Major advantages of the proposed system are as follows: 1) A range sensor based generalized navigation system. 2) No need for the modification of environments. 3) Intelligent navigation-related components. 4) Framework supporting the selection of multiple behaviors and error/fault handling schemes. Experimental results are presented in order to show the feasibility of the proposed navigation system. The result of this research has been successfully applied to our three service robots in a variety of task domains including a delivery, a patrol, a guide, and a floor cleaning task.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.334-340
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• 2007

This paper introduces a prototype smart home environment that is built in the research building to demonstrate the feasibility of a robot-assisted future home environment. Localization, navigation, object recognition and handling are core functionalities that an intelligent service robot should provide. A huge amount of research effort has been made to make the service robot perform these functions with its own sensors, actuators and a knowledge base. With all complicated configuration of sensors, actuators and a database, the robot could only perform the given tasks in a predefined environment or show the limited capabilities in a natural environment. We started a smart home environment for service robots for simple service robots to provide reliable services by communicating with the environment through the wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we introduce various types of smart devices that are developed for assisting the robot in the environment by providing sensor and actuator capabilities. In addition, we present how the devices are integrated to constitute the smart home environment for service robots.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.8
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• pp.731-742
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• 2007

Self-growing software is a software system that has the capability of evolving its functionalities and configurations by itself based on dynamically monitored situations. Self-growing software is especially necessary for intelligent service robots, which must have the capability to monitor their surrounding environments and provide appropriate behaviors for human users. However, it is hard to anticipate all situations that robots face with, and it is hard to make robots have all functionalities for various environments. In addition, robots have limited internal capacity. To support self-growing software for intelligent service robots, we are developing a cell-based distributed repository system that allows robots and developers transparently to share robot functionalities. To accomplish the creation of evolutionary repositories, we invented the concept of a cell, which is a logical group of distributed repositories based upon the functionalities of components. In addition, a cell can be used as a unit for the evolutionary growth of the components within the repositories. In this paper, we describe the requirements and architecture of the cell-based repository system for self-growing software. We also present a prototype implementation and experiment of the repository system. Through the cell-based repositories, we achieve improved performance of self-growing actions for robots and efficient sharing of components among robots and developers.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2008.05a
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• pp.846-850
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• 2008

Technologies related to sealed-type ultrasonic sensors and driving circuit modules for them are the key elements for intelligent robot industry. Those technologies are believed to yield a drastic enhancement of the performance measuring distances in the intelligent robot systems. Modulization technologies of ultrasonic sensors are expected to develop ASIC and MEMS technologies in the future. The size of domestic market for sealed-type ultrasonic sensor modules is expected to grow to 1 billion and 5.72 billion Won by 2008 and 2012, respectively. Recent interest to service robots and government-driven programs are promoting the rapid growth of the market for the service robots. Successful application of the sealed-type ultrasonic modules to the service robots is expected to replace the conventional photo-sensors in a near future.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.433-439
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• 2010

This paper proposes a beacon color code scheduling algorithm for the localization of multiple robots in a multi-block workspace. With the developments of intelligent robotics and ubiquitous technology, service robots are applicable for the wide area such as airports and train stations where multiple indoor GPS systems are required for the localization of the mobile robots. Indoor localization schemes using ultrasonic sensors have been widely studied due to its cheap price and high accuracy. However, ultrasonic sensors have some shortages of short transmission range and interferences with other ultrasonic signals. In order to use multiple robots in wide workspace concurrently, it is necessary to resolve the interference problem among the multiple robots in the localization process. This paper proposes an indoor localization system for concurrent multiple robots localization in a wide service area which is divided into multi-block for the reliable sensor operation. The beacon color code scheduling algorithm is developed to avoid the signal interferences and to achieve efficient localization with high accuracy and short sampling time. The performance of the proposed localization system is verified through the simulations and the real experiments.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.771-778
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• 2004

Recently, various applications of robot system become more popular in accordance with rapid development of computer hardware/software, artificial intelligence, and automatic control technology. Formerly robots mainly have been used in industrial field, however, nowadays it is said that the robot will do an important role in the home service application. To make the robot more useful, we require further researches on implementation of natural communication method between the human and the robot system, and autonomous behavior generation. The gesture recognition technique is one of the most convenient methods for natural human-robot interaction, so it is to be solved for implementation of intelligent robot system. In this paper, we describe the state-of-the-art of advanced gesture recognition technologies for intelligent robots according to three methods; sensor based method, feature based method, appearance based method, and 3D model based method. And we also discuss some problems and real applications in the research field.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.12
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• pp.1365-1375
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• 2016

One of the most important capabilities for autonomous service robots working in living environments is to recognize and understand the correct context in dynamically changing environment. To generate high-level context knowledge for decision-making from multiple sensory data streams, many technical problems such as multi-modal sensory data fusion, uncertainty handling, symbolic knowledge grounding, time dependency, dynamics, and time-constrained spatio-temporal reasoning should be solved. Considering these problems, this paper proposes an effective dynamic context management and spatio-temporal reasoning method for intelligent service robots. In order to guarantee efficient context management and reasoning, our algorithm was designed to generate low-level context knowledge reactively for every input sensory or perception data, while postponing high-level context knowledge generation until it was demanded by the decision-making module. When high-level context knowledge is demanded, it is derived through backward spatio-temporal reasoning. In experiments with Turtlebot using Kinect visual sensor, the dynamic context management and spatio-temporal reasoning system based on the proposed method showed high performance.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.30.2-30
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• 2001

As the era of the human friendly robot looms, the intelligent autonomous mobile robots have obtained tremendous interests in recent years. The robots may be service robots for serving human or industrial robots for replacing human. For the coexistance with human, the robots must be able to feel and recognize three dimensional space that human live. In this paper, we propose three dimensional environmental modeling method based on a neural network technique called Growing Neural Gas Network. The purpose of this neural network is to generate a graphical structure which reflects the topology of the input space. Through this method, the robots´ surroundings are autonomously segmented ...

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.21-29
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• 2009

An intelligent service robot is a robot that monitors its surroundings, and then provides a service to meet a user's goal. It is normally impossible for a robot to anticipate all the needs of its user and various situations in the surroundings ahead, and to prepare for all the necessary functions to cope with them. Therefore, it is required to support the self-growing capability by which robots can extend their functionality based on users' needs and external conditions. In this paper, as an enabler of the self-growing capability, we propose a method that allows a robot to select a component-composition pattern represented in an architectural form (called a sub-architecture), and to extend its functionality by obtaining a set of software components that are prescribed in the pattern. Sub-architecture is selected and instantiated not only based on the functionality required but also based on quality requirements of a user and the surrounding environment. To provide this method, we constructed a quality-attributes-in-use ontology and developed a brokering mechanism that matches quality requirements of users and surroundings against quality attributes of sub-architectures. The ontology provides the common vocabularies to represent quality requirements and attributes, and enables the semantically-based reasoning in matching and instantiating appropriate sub-architectures in supporting services to users. This ontology-based approach contributes to provide a great flexibility in extending robot functionality based on available software components, and to narrow the gap between users' Quality requirements and the Quality of the actual services provided by a robot.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.497-508
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• 2009

As the educational use of intelligent service robots has been proved to be effective, educational service robots have been utilized in kindergarten. In addition, service robots will be used in elementary schools from 2010 for the after-school English program. This trend indicates that r-Learning using service robots will become a major educational paradigm in preparing for future education. This article consists of the following four parts. First, the concept and the type of educational robots were defined and the trend of previous research was examined. Second, the characteristics of robot-assisted learning were analyzed as a part of r-Learning, and difference between r-Learning and u-Learning was compared. Third, the contents and service using a robot-assisted learning system were discussed, the models and trend of service using the robot-assisted learning system were examined, and the aspects of viewing evolution were compared. Finally, suggestions for activating the service market of robot-assisted learning were made for the educational institution, research institution, government and robot companies.