• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.64 no.9
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• pp.1356-1362
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• 2015

Modular snake-like robots are robust for failure and have flexible locomotions for obstacle environment than of walking robot. This requires an adaptation capability which is obtained from a learning approach, but has not been analysed as well. In order to investigate the property of adaptation of locomotion for different terrains, NEAT controllers are trained for a flat terrain and tested for obstacle terrains. The input and output characteristics of the adaptation for the neural network controller are analyzed for different terrains in frequency domain.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.1309-1323
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• 2020

Crowd evacuation simulation is an important research issue for designing reasonable building layouts and planning more effective evacuation routes. The social force model (SFM) is an important pedestrian movement model, and is widely used in crowd evacuation simulations. The model can effectively simulate crowd evacuation behaviors in a simple scene, but for a multi-obstacle scene, the model could result in some undesirable problems, such as pedestrian evacuation trajectory oscillation, pedestrian stagnation and poor evacuation routing. This paper analyzes the causes of these problems and proposes an improved SFM for complex multi-obstacle scenes. The new model adds navigation points and walking shortest route principles to the SFM. Based on the proposed model, a crowd evacuation simulation system is developed, and the crowd evacuation simulation was carried out in various scenes, including some with simple obstacles, as well as those with multi-obstacles. Experiments show that the pedestrians in the proposed model can effectively bypass obstacles and plan reasonable evacuation routes.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Physical Medicine
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.55-62
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• 2019

PURPOSE: This study examined the muscle activity while stepping over obstacles with various heights and widths to provide basic data for training and preventing falls. METHODS: Fifteen normal young adults (seven males and eight females) were recruited. The participants walked on a 5m walkway with six obstacles. The heights of obstacles were 0%, 10%, and 40% of the subject's leg length, and the width of the obstacles was 7cm and 14cm. The participants traversed the course twice per obstacle. The muscle activities of the soleus, tibialis anterior (TA), vastus medialis (VM), and vastus lateralis (VL) were measured using surface electromyography. A Mann-Whitney test and Kruskal-Wallis test were used to examine the differences between obstacles. RESULTS: The muscle activities of the VL and the soleus of the stance leg and lead leg after crossing over the obstacles increased with increasing width, and there were significant differences in muscle activities between obstacle width (p<.05) except for the muscle activity of TA of the stance leg after crossing over the obstacles. A significant difference in muscle activities was observed according to the height of the obstacles with 14 cm (p<.05) except for the muscle activity of the VL, soleus of the leading leg, and TA of the stance leg CONCLUSION: The role of the VL and Soleus increased with increasing obstacle width, and the overall muscle activities of the lower extremities increased with increasing obstacle height. These results can be used to suggest a program to prevent falls.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.599-607
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• 2021

Street-view images, which are omnidirectional scenes centered on a specific location on the road, can provide various obstacle information for the pedestrians. Pedestrian network data for the navigation services should reflect the up-to-date obstacle information to ensure the mobility of pedestrians, including people with disabilities. In this study, the object detection model was trained for the bollard as a major obstacle in Seoul using street-view images and a deep learning algorithm. Also, a process for updating information about the presence and number of bollards as obstacle properties for the crosswalk node through spatial matching between the detected bollards and the pedestrian nodes was proposed. The missing crosswalk information can also be updated concurrently by the proposed process. The proposed approach is appropriate for crowdsourcing data as the model trained using the street-view images can be applied to photos taken with a smartphone while walking. Through additional training with various obstacles captured in the street-view images, it is expected to enable efficient information update about obstacles on the road.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.393-400
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• 2015

This paper describes the development of a chest-wearable robot that can efficiently perform self walking rehabilitation without a helper. The features of the developed robot are divided into three parts. First, as a mechanical characteristic, the conventional elbow crutch is attached at the forearm. However, the proposed robot is attached to the patient's chest, enabling them to feel free to use their hands and eliminate the burden of the arms. Second, as a characteristic of the driving algorithm, pressure sensors attached to the chest automatically perceive the patient's walking intention and move the robot-leg thereafter. Also, for safety, it stops operating when an obstacle is found in front of the patient by using ultrasonic sensors and generates a beeping sound. Finally, by using the scotch yoke mechanism, supporting legs are moved up and down using a rotary servo motor without excessive torque that is generated by large ground reaction forces. We showed that the developed robot can effectively perform self walking rehabilitation through walking experiments, and its performance was verified using Electromyograph (EMG) sensors.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• no.38
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• pp.192-200
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• 2003

Interactions with the environment do to firm, deny, or challenge the existing knowledge. People who suffer from the loss of the sight have difficulty conceiving the space and the direction as well as walking. In the study, it wanted to reveal that the border that Is provided as a transfer clue has psychological and functional meaning to the sight-disabled people under given circumstances. It suggests that there is another space among the physical borders and analyzes the utilization clue in the entry space, which is the first starting point that can transfer, and obstacle factors which may happen at that point. And, it also wanted to present the surrounding environmental improvement ways for walking which is smooth and confident based on them.

• Proceeding of EDISON Challenge
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• 2016.03a
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• pp.411-416
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• 2016

Existing moving robots has several kinds of moving method; using wheel, jointed leg structure and so on. Wheel type can be operated by DC motor so it is simple and efficient. However, it is not appropriate to pass irregular terrain and obstacle. Leg structure type has an advantage in those cases. Generally, Leg structure is operated by several servo motors attached to each joint. It makes a robot heavier and more complicate due to increase of the degree of freedom. However, by using Theo Jansen Mechanism, one (or more) leg have only single-degree of freedom and can be operated by only one DC motor. So leg structure using Theo Jansen Mechanism will be good choice if robots have to be mass-produced. This paper describes the following a walking robot designed and produced based on Theo Jansen Mechanism, simulating process of Theo Jansen leg structure using Edison m.Sketch and how to solve several of discovered problem of the robot.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.236-241
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• 2008

This paper presents a method to recognize the plane regions for movement of walking robots. When the autonomous agencies using stereo camera or laser scanning sensor is under unknown 3D environment, the mobile agency has to detect the plane regions to decide the moving direction and perform the given tasks. In this paper, we propose a very fast method for plane detection using normal vector of a triangle by 3 vertices defined on a small circular region. To reduce the effect of noises and outliers, the triangle rotates with respect to the center position of the circular region and generates a series of triangles with different normal vectors based on different three points on the boundary of the circular region. The vectors for several triangles are normalized and then median direction of the normal vectors is used to test the planarity of the circular region. The method is very fast and we prove the performance of algorithm for real range data obtained from a stereo camera system.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.279-289
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• 2011

The latest hardware and software techniques are combined to give safe walking guidance and convenient service of realtime walking assistance system for visually impaired person. This system consists of obstacle detection and perception, place recognition, and sign recognition for pedestrian can safely walking to arrive at their destination. In this paper, we exploit the sign object detection system in subway station for sign recognition that one of the important factors of walking assistance system. This paper suggest the adaptive feature map that can be robustly extract the sign object region from complexed environment with light and noise. And recognize a sign using fast zernike moment features which is invariant under translation, rotation and scale of object during walking. We considered three types of signs as arrow, restroom, and exit number and perform the training and recognizing steps through adaboost classifier. The experimental results prove that our method can be suitable and stable for real-time system through yields on the average 87.16% stable detection rate and 20 frame/sec of operation time for three types of signs in 5000 images of sign database.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.533-538
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• 2017

In this thesis, the ambulatory aid mechanism was implemented so that blind people could be safer at risk of walking outdoors. Using ultrasonic sensors, the obstacles can be detected when the distance between the obstacle is within 50 cm of the obstacle. If the light sensor becomes less than 25 lux, the LED will automatically turn on and help the safety of the visually impaired and the security of sight of the peripheral walkers. Color recognition sensors increase the rate of recognition of yellow color by the detection distance is 1cm, it vibrated when yellow light was detected. Using GPS with 7.3 m of error range, the guardian was able to check the location of the visually impaired.