• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.551-557
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• 2014

This paper presents a robust lateral controller for autonomous guidance of a farm tractor in field operations. Although mechanical steering actuators have recently been used for passenger vehicles, the steering actuator of the farm tractor is based on a hydraulic system, resulting in limited bandwidth and a larger time delay. Based on a kinematic tractor model with steering actuator dynamics, a nonlinear control technique called dynamic surface control is applied to design a robust lateral controller that compensates for uncertainty owing to steering actuator and road geometry. Finally, tracking performance and robustness of the proposed controller are validated via commercial tractor simulations, with respect to the time delay of the steering actuator and road geometry (e.g., up and down hills), on a given field with a constant friction coefficient.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.99-105
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• 2011

This paper presents a method to design a centralized repetitive controller that is robust to variations in the multiple system parameters. The uncertain parameters are specified probabilistically by their probability distribution functions. Instead of working with the distribution functions directly, the centralized repetitive controller is designed from a set of models that are generated from the specified probability functions. With this multiple-model design approach, any number of uncertain parameters that follow any type of distribution functions can be treated. Furthermore, the controller is derived by minimizing a frequency-domain based cost function that produces monotonic convergence of the tracking error as a function of repetition number. Numerical illustrations show how the proposed multiple-model design method produces a repetitive controller that is significantly more robust than an optimal repetitive controller designed from a single nominal model of the multiple system.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.7
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• pp.838-848
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• 2015

One of the most important operations in nuclear power plants is load following, in which an imbalance of axial power distribution induces xenon oscillations. These oscillations must be maintained within acceptable limits otherwise the nuclear power plant could become unstable. Therefore, bounded xenon oscillation is considered to be a constraint for the load following operation. In this paper, the design of a sliding mode control (SMC), which is a robust nonlinear controller, is presented.SMCis ameansto control pressurized water nuclear reactor (PWR) power for the load following operation problem in a way that ensures xenon oscillations are kept bounded within acceptable limits. The proposed controller uses constant axial offset (AO) strategy to ensure xenon oscillations remain bounded. The constant AO is a robust state constraint for the load following problem. The reactor core is simulated based on the two-point nuclear reactor model with a three delayed neutron groups. The stability analysis is given by means of the Lyapunov approach, thus the control system is guaranteed to be stable within a large range. The employed method is easy to implement in practical applications and moreover, the SMC exhibits the desired dynamic properties during the entire output-tracking process independent of perturbations. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller in terms of performance, robustness, and stability. Results show that the proposed controller for the load following operation is so effective that the xenon oscillations are kept bounded in the given region.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.112-118
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• 2009

Skin color segmentation techniques have been widely utilized for face/hand detection and tracking in many applications such as a diagnosis system using facial information, human-robot interaction, an image retrieval system. In case of a video image, it is common that the skin color model for a target is updated every frame for the robust target tracking against illumination change. As for a single image, however, most of studies employ a fixed skin color model which may result in low detection rate or high false positive errors. In this paper, we propose a novel method for effective skin color segmentation in a single image, which modifies the conditions for skin color segmentation iteratively by the image feedback of segmented skin color region in a given image.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.2094-2105
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• 1994

This paper contains a Hough transform based projection method derived from Radon transform for tracking dim unresolved(sub-pixel) moving targets that move along straight line parths across a time sequential image data. In contrast to several recently presented Hough transform methods using a compressed image referred to as the track map our proposed technique utilizing a set of projections taken along arbitrary orientations effectively increases the changes of target detection, and creates a robust track estimation environment by incorporating all the available knowledge obtained from the projections. Moreover, in order to quantitatively assess the estimation capability of the projection-based Hough transform algorithm, the analytical bounds on the Hough space parameter errors introduced by image space noise contamination are derived. The simulation yielded promising results of estimating the track parameters even under low signal to noise rations when our technique was tested against the time sequential sets of real infrared image data referred to as the HiCamps.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.105-114
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• 2011

The snake algorithm is widely adopted to track objects by extracting the active contour of the object from background. However, it fails to track the target converging to the background if there exists background whose gradient is greater than that of the pixels on the contour. Also, the contour may shrink when the target moves fast and the snake algorithm misses the boundary of the object in its searching window. To alleviate these problems, we propose an improved algorithm that can track object contour more robustly. Firstly, we propose two external energy functions, the edge energy and the contrast energy. One is designed to give more weight to the gradient on the boundary and the other to reflect the contrast difference between the object and background. Secondly, by computing the motion vector of the contour from the difference of the two consecutive frames, we can move the snake pointers of the previous frame near the region where the object boundary is probable at the current frame. Computer experiments show that the proposed method is more robust to the complicated background than the previously known methods and can track the object with fast movement.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.113-121
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• 2020

Human Pose Estimation (HPE) which localizes the human body joints becomes a high potential for high-level applications in the field of computer vision. The main challenges of HPE in real-time are occlusion, illumination change and diversity of pose appearance. The single RGB image is fed into HPE framework in order to reduce the computation cost by using depth-independent device such as a common camera, webcam, or phone cam. However, HPE based on the single RGB is not able to solve the above challenges due to inherent characteristics of color or texture. On the other hand, depth information which is fed into HPE framework and detects the human body parts in 3D coordinates can be usefully used to solve the above challenges. However, the depth information-based HPE requires the depth-dependent device which has space constraint and is cost consuming. Especially, the result of depth information-based HPE is less reliable due to the requirement of pose initialization and less stabilization of frame tracking. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method of HPE which is robust in estimating self-occlusion. There are many human parts which can be occluded by other body parts. However, this paper focuses only on head self-occlusion. The new method is a combination of the RGB image-based HPE framework and the depth information-based HPE framework. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method by COCO Object Keypoint Similarity library. By taking an advantage of RGB image-based HPE method and depth information-based HPE method, our HPE method based on RGB-D achieved the mAP of 0.903 and mAR of 0.938. It proved that our method outperforms the RGB-based HPE and the depth-based HPE.

• Journal of Power System Engineering
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.72-77
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• 2011

The handling ability of containers at the terminal strongly depends on the performance of the cargo handling system such as RTGC(Rubber Tired Gantry Crane). This paper introduces a new guide line position measurement method using a camera for the RTGC which plays a important role in the harbor area. Because the line tracking is the basic technique for control system design of RTGC, it is necessary to develop a useful and reliable measurement system. If the displacement and angle of the RTGC relative to a guide line as trajectory to follow is obtained, the position of RTGC is calculated. Therefore, in this paper, a camera-based measurement system is introduced. The proposed measurement system is robust against light fluctuation and cracks of the guideline. This system consists of a camera and a PC which are installed at the lower side of the RTGC. Two edges of the guide line are detected from an input image taken by the camera, and these positions are determined in a Hough parameter space by using the Hough transformation method. From the experimental results, high accurate standard deviations were found as 0.98 pixel of the displacement and 0.24 degree of the angle, including robustness against lighting fluctuation and cracks of the guide line also.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.7 no.9
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• pp.749-757
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• 2001

We present a simple artificial landmark model and robust landmark tracking algorithm for mobile robot localization. The landmark model, consisting of symmetric and repetitive color patches, produces color histograms that are invariant under the geometric and photometric distortions. A stochastic approach based on the CONDENSATION tracks the landmark model robustly even under the varying illumination conditions. After the landmark detection, relative position of the mobile robot to the landmark is calculated. Experimental results show that the proposed landmark model is effective and can be detected and tracked in a clustered scene robustly. With the tracked single landmark, we extract geometrical information than achieve accurate localization.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.1187-1200
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• 2002

This paper is concerned with the design or an LMI (Linear Matrix Inequality) -based H$\infty$ controller for a line of sight (LOS) stabilization system and with its robustness performance. The linearization of the system is necessary to analyze various nonlinear characteristics, but the linearization entails modeling uncertainties which reduce its performance. In addition, the stability of the LOS can be adversely affected by angular velocity disturbances while the vehicle is moving. As the vehicle accelerates, all the factors that are Ignored and simplified for the linearization tend to Inhibit the performance of the system. The robustness in the face of these uncertainties needs to be assured. This paper employs H$\infty$ control theory to address these problems and the LMI method to provide a suitable controller with minimal constraints for the system. Even though the system matrix does not have a full rank, the proposed method makes it possible to design a H$\infty$ controller and to deal with R and S matrices for reducing the system order. It can be also shown that the proposed robust controller has a better disturbance attenuation and tracking performance. The LMI method is also used to enhance the applicability of the proposed reduced-order H$\infty$ controller for the system given. The LMI-based H$\infty$ controller has superior disturbance attenuation and reference input tracking performance, compared with that of the conventional controller under real disturbances.