• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.2519-2523
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• 2003

Ultrasonic sensors are widely used in mobile robot applications to recognize external environments, because they are cheap, easy to use, and robust under varying lighting conditions. In most cases, a single ultrasonic sensor is used to measure the distance to an object based on time-of-flight (TOF) information, whereas multiple sensors are used to recognize the shape of an object, such as a corner, plane, or edge. However, the conventional sequential driving technique involves a long measurement time. This problem can be resolved by pulse coding ultrasonic signals, which allows multi-sensors to be fired simultaneously and adjacent objects to be distinguished. Accordingly, the current presents a new simultaneous coded driving system for an ultrasonic sensor array for object recognition in autonomous mobile robots. The proposed system is designed and implemented using a DSP and FPGA. A micro-controller board is made using a DSP, Polaroid 6500 ranging modules are modified for firing the coded signals, and a 5-channel coded signal generating board is made using a FPGA. To verify the proposed method, experiments were conducted in an environment with overlapping signals, and the flight distances for each sensor were obtained from the received overlapping signals using correlations and conversion to a bipolar PCM-NRZ signal.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.154-160
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• 2006

Instantaneous reaction and intelligence are required for autonomous mobile robots to achieve multiple goals in the unpredictable and dynamic environments. Design of the appropriate control architecture and clear definitions of systems are needed to construct and control these robots. This research proposes the hybrid deliberative/reactive control architecture which consists of three layers and uses the method of software structure design. The highest layer, Deliberative Layer makes the overall run-time schedule for navigation and/or manipulation, and the middle layer, Task Execution Layer carries out various missions. The lowest layer, Reactive Layer enables a robot to react rapidly in the dynamic environment and controls the mechanical devices concurrently. This paper proposes independent system supervisors called Manager to reuse the modules so that the Manager supports common use of the system and multi-processing tasks. It is shown that the mobile robot based on the proposed control scheme can perform the basic navigation and cope with the dynamic obstacles reasonably well.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.379-384
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• 2013

We propose a new global positioning method for the indoor mobile robots. The multiple indoor lights fixed in ceiling are used as the landmarks of positioning system. The ceiling images are acquired by the fisheye lens camera mounted on the moving robot. The position and orientation of the lights are extracted by binarization and labeling techniques. Also the boundary lines between ceiling and walls are extracted to identify the order of each light. The robot position is then calculated from the extracted position and known position of the lights. The proposed system can increase the accuracy and reduce the computation time comparing with the other positioning methods using natural landmark. Experimental results are presented to show the performance of the method.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.165-171
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• 2004

Robots will be able to coexist with humans and support humans effectively in near future. One of the most important aspects in the development of human-friendly robots is to cooperation between humans and robots. In this paper, we proposed a method for multi-object identification in order to achieve such human-centered system and robot localization in intelligent space. The intelligent space is the space where many intelligent devices, such as computers and sensors, are distributed. The Intelligent Space achieves the human centered services by accelerating the physical and psychological interaction between humans and intelligent devices. As an intelligent device of the Intelligent Space, a color CCD camera module, which includes processing and networking part, has been chosen. The Intelligent Space requires functions of identifying and tracking the multiple objects to realize appropriate services to users under the multi-camera environments. In order to achieve seamless tracking and location estimation many camera modules are distributed. They causes some errors about object identification among different camera modules. This paper describes appearance based object representation for the distributed vision system in Intelligent Space to achieve consistent labeling of all objects. Then, we discuss how to learn the object color appearance model and how to achieve the multi-object tracking under occlusions.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.07d
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• pp.2780-2782
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• 2005

In this paper, we present a mobile robot localization solution by using a Ubiquitous Vision System (UVS). The collective information gathered by multiple cameras that are strategically placed has many advantages. For example, aggregation of information from multiple viewpoints reduces the uncertainty about the robots' positions. We construct UVS as a multi-agent system by regarding each vision sensor as one vision agent (VA). Each VA performs target segmentation by color and motion information as well as visual tracking for multiple objects. Our modified identified contractnet (ICN) protocol is used for communication between VAs to coordinate multitask. This protocol raises scalability and modularity of thesystem because of independent number of VAs and needless calibration. Furthermore, the handover between VAs by using ICN is seamless. Experimental results show the robustness of the solution with respect to a widespread area. The performance in indoor environments shows the feasibility of the proposed solution in real-time.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.345-350
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• 2021

The maintenance of sensor networks, installed in a wide area has been an issue for a long time. In order to solve this problem, studies to supply energy to a sensor network using a robot has been carried out by several researchers. In this study, for a sensor network consisting of power nodes supplied with energy by multiple robots and sensor nodes around them, we propose a method of allocating a work area using a modified k-means algorithm so that the robots move the minimum distance. Through the simulation study using the energy transfer rate of the robot as a variable, it is shown that nodes of each allocated area can maintain survival, and the validity of the proposed modified k-means algorithm is verified.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.614-619
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• 2013

In multi-robot systems, ultrasonic sensors are widely used for localization and/or obstacle detection. However, conventional ultrasonic sensors have a drawback, that is, the interference problem among ultrasonic transmitters. There are some previous studies to avoid interferences, such as TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). In multiple autonomous mobile robots systems, the Doppler-effect has to be considered because ultrasonic transceivers are attached to the moving robots. To overcome this problem, we find out the ASK (Amplitude Shift Keying)-CDMA technique is more robust to the Doppler-effect than the BPSK (Binary Phase Shift Keying)-CDMA technique. In this paper, we propose a new code-expression method and a Monte-Carlo based algorithm that optimizes the ultrasonic code combination in the ASK-CDMA ultrasonic system. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the performance of the ultrasonic multiple accessing capacity in the ASK-CDMA ultrasonic system.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.25-33
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• 2009

One of the main problems of topological localization in a real indoor environment is variations in the environment caused by dynamic objects and changes in illumination. Another problem arises from the sense of topological localization itself. Thus, a robot must be able to recognize observations at slightly different positions and angles within a certain topological location as identical in terms of topological localization. In this paper, a possible solution to these problems is addressed in the domain of global topological localization for mobile robots, in which environments are represented by their visual appearance. Our approach is formulated on the basis of a probabilistic model called the Bayes filter. Here, marginalization of dynamics in the environment, marginalization of viewpoint changes in a topological location, and fusion of multiple visual features are employed to measure observations reliably, and action-based view transition model and action-associated topological map are used to predict the next state. We performed experiments to demonstrate the validity of our proposed approach among several standard approaches in the field of topological localization. The results clearly demonstrated the value of our approach.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.836-846
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• 2023

Mobile robots are used in modern life; however, object recognition is still insufficient to realize robot navigation in crowded environments. Mobile robots must rapidly and accurately recognize the movements and shapes of pedestrians to navigate safely in pedestrian-rich spaces. This study proposes real-time, accurate, three-dimensional (3D) multi-pedestrian detection and tracking using a 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point cloud in crowded environments. The pedestrian detection quickly segments a sparse 3D point cloud into individual pedestrians using a lightweight convolutional autoencoder and connected-component algorithm. The multi-pedestrian tracking identifies the same pedestrians considering motion and appearance cues in continuing frames. In addition, it estimates pedestrians' dynamic movements with various patterns by adaptively mixing heterogeneous motion models. We evaluate the computational speed and accuracy of each module using the KITTI dataset. We demonstrate that our integrated system, which rapidly and accurately recognizes pedestrian movement and appearance using a sparse 3D LiDAR, is applicable for robot navigation in crowded spaces.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.212-220
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• 2007

This paper proposes a method of avoiding obstacles and tracking a moving object continuously and simultaneously by using new concepts of virtual tow point and fuzzy danger factor for differential wheeled mobile robots. Since differential wheeled mobile robot has smaller degree of freedom to control and are non-holonomic systems, there exist multiple solutions (trajectories) to control and reach a target position. The paper proposes 'fuzzy danger factor' for obstacles avoidance, 'virtual tow point' to solve non-holonomic object tracking control problem for unique solution and three kinds of fuzzy logic controller. The fuzzy logic controller is policy decision controller with fuzzy danger factor to decide which controller's result is more valuable when the mobile robot is tracking a moving object with obstacles to be avoided.