• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.505-511
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• 2011

In this paper, we have developed an automatic velocity control system of a small-sized commercial treadmill (belt length of 1.2 m and width of 0.5 m) which is widely used at home and health centers. The control objective is to automatically adjust the treadmill velocity so that the subject's position is maintained within the track when the subject walks at a variable velocity. The subject's position with respect to a reference point is measured by a low-cost sonar sensor located on the back of the subject. Based on an encoder sensor measurement at the treadmill motor, a state feedback control algorithm with Kalman filter was implemented to determine the velocity of the treadmill. In order to reduce the unnatural inertia force felt by the subject, a predefined acceleration limit was applied, which generated smooth velocity trajectories. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in providing successful velocity changes in response to variable velocity walking without causing significant inertia force to the subject. In the pilot study with three subjects, users could change their walking velocity easily and naturally with small deviations during slow, medium, and fast walking. The proposed automatic velocity control algorithm can potentially be applied to any locomotion interface in an economical way without having to use sophisticated and expensive sensors and larger treadmills.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.713-718
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• 2012

Lumber spine range of motion has been used to measure of physical and functional impairment by various tools from a ruler to 3D kinematic devices. However, pre-existing tools have problems in either movement or accuracy and reliability limitations. Accurate devices are limited by fixed space whereas simple devices are limited in measuring complex movements with less accuracy. In order to solve the location, movement and accuracy limitations at once, we have developed a novice measurement device equipped with accelerometer sensor and gyroscope sensor for getting three-dimensional information of motion. Furthermore, Kalman filter was applied to the algorithm to improve accuracy. In addition, RF wireless communication was added for the user to conveniently check measured data in real time. Finally, the measurement method was improved by considering the movement by a reference point. An experiment was conducted to test the accuracy and reliability of the device by conducting a test-retest reliability test. Further modification will be conducted to used the device in various joints range of motion in clinical settings in the future.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.723-730
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• 2015

In this paper, a location tracking compensation algorithm based on the Least-Squares Method ($LCA_{LSM}$) was proposed to improve the autonomous tracking efficiency for the docent robot in exhibition hall, and the performance of the $LCA_{LSM}$ is analyzed by several practical experiments. The proposed $LCA_{LSM}$ compensates the collected location coordinates for the robot using the Least-Squares Method (LSM) in order to reduce the cumulated errors that occur in the Encoder/Giro sensor (E/G) and to enhance the measured tracking accuracy rates in the autonomous tracking of the robot in exhibition hall. By experiments, it was confirmed that the average error reduction rates of the $LCA_{LSM}$ are higher as 4.85% than that of the $LCA_{KF}$ in Scenario 1 (S1) and Scenario 2 (S2), respectively on the location tracking. In addition, it was also confirmed that the standard deviation in the measured errors of the $LCA_{LSM}$ are much more low and constant compared to that of the E/G sensor and the $LCA_{KF}$ in S1 and S2 respectively. Finally, we see that the suggested $LCA_{LSM}$ can execute more the stabilized location tracking than the E/G sensors and the $LCA_{KF}$ on the straight lines of S1 and S2 for the docent robot.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.13-22
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• 2013

A motion capture system is widely used in movies, computer game, and computer animation industries because it allows for creating realistic human motions efficiently. The inertial motion capture system has several advantages over more popular vision-based systems in terms of the required space and cost. However, it suffers from low accuracy due to the relatively high noise levels of the inertial sensors. In particular, the accelerometer used for measuring gravity direction loses the accuracy when the sensor is moving with non-zero linear acceleration. In this paper, we propose a method to remove the linear acceleration component from the accelerometer data in order to improve the accuracy of measuring gravity direction. In addition, we develop a simple method to calibrate the joint axis of a link to which an inertial sensor belongs as well as the position of a sensor with respect to the link. The calibration enables attaching inertial sensors in an arbitrary position and orientation with respect to a link.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.667-675
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• 2013

This paper presents vision-based techniques for underwater landmark detection, map-based localization, and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) in structured underwater environments. A variety of underwater tasks require an underwater robot to be able to successfully perform autonomous navigation, but the available sensors for accurate localization are limited. A vision sensor among the available sensors is very useful for performing short range tasks, in spite of harsh underwater conditions including low visibility, noise, and large areas of featureless topography. To overcome these problems and to a utilize vision sensor for underwater localization, we propose a novel vision-based object detection technique to be applied to MCL (Monte Carlo Localization) and EKF (Extended Kalman Filter)-based SLAM algorithms. In the image processing step, a weighted correlation coefficient-based template matching and color-based image segmentation method are proposed to improve the conventional approach. In the localization step, in order to apply the landmark detection results to MCL and EKF-SLAM, dead-reckoning information and landmark detection results are used for prediction and update phases, respectively. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated by experiments with an underwater robot platform in an indoor water tank and the results are discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• v.1
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• pp.141-144
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• 2006

The deviations in the injection orbital parameters, resulting from launcher dispersions, need to be estimated and used for autonomous satellite operations. For the proposed small satellite mission of the university there will be two GPS receivers onboard the satellite to provide the instantaneous orbital state to the onboard data handling system. In order to meet the power requirements, the satellite will be sun-tracking whenever there is no imaging operation. For imaging activities, the satellite will be maneuvered to nadir-pointing mode. Due to such different modes of orientation the geometry for the GPS receivers will not be favorable at all times and there will be instances of poor geometry resulting in no output from the GPS receivers. Onboard the satellite, the orbital information should be continuously available for autonomous switching on/off of various subsystems. The paper presents the strategies to make use of small arcs of data from GPS receivers to compute the mean orbital parameters and use the updated orbital parameters to calculate the position and velocity whenever the same is not available from GPS receiver. Thus the navigation message from the GPS receiver, namely the position vector in Earth-Centered-Earth-Fixed (ECEF) frame, is used as measurements. As for estimation, two techniques - (1) batch least squares method, and (2) Kalman Filter method are used for orbit estimation (in real time). The performance of the onboard orbit estimation has been assessed based on hardware based multi-channel GPS Signal simulator. The results indicate good converge even with short arcs of data as the GPS navigation data are generally very accurate and the data rate is also fast (typically 1Hz).