• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.516-523
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• 2009

Recently, the applications of unmanned robots are increasing in various fields including surveillance and reconnaissance, planet exploration and disaster relief. To perform their missions with success, the robots should be able to evaluate terrain's characteristics quantitatively and identify traversable regions to progress toward a goal using mounted sensors. Recently, the authors have proposed techniques that extract terrain information and analyze traversability for off-road navigation of an unmanned robot. In this paper, we examine the use of 3D world models(terrain maps) to classify obstacle and safe terrain for increasing the reliability of the proposed techniques. A world model is divided into several patches and each patch is classified as belonging either to an obstacle or a non-obstacle using three types of metrics. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on real terrain maps.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.909-915
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• 2008

Recently, the interests in the development and application of unmaned robots are increasing in various fields including surveillance and reconnaissance, planet exploration, and disaster relief. Unmaned robots are usually controlled from distance using radio communications but they should be equipped with an autonomous travelling function to cope with unexpected terrains and obstacles. This means that they should be able to evaluate terrain's characteristics quantitatively using mounted sensors so as to traverse harsh natural terrains autonomously. For this purpose, this paper presents a method for extracting terrain information, that is, slope and roughness from elevation maps as a prior step of traversability analysis. Slope is extracted using the curve fitting based on the least squares method and roughness using three metrics and their weighted average. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on both a fractal map and the world model map of a real terrain.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.116-128
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• 2013

This paper focuses on development of a testbed for analysis of robot-terrain interaction on rough terrain and also, through one wheel driving experiments using this testbed, prediction of maximum velocity and acceleration of UGV. Firstly, from the review regarding previous researches for terrain modeling, the main variables for measurement are determined. A testbed is developed to measure main variables related to robot-terrain interaction. Experiments are performed on three kinds of rough terrains (grass, gravel, and sand) and traction-slip curves are obtained using the data of the drawbar pull and slip ratio. Traction-slip curves are used to predict driving performance of UGV on rough terrain. Maximum velocity and acceleration of UGVs are predicted by the simple kinematics and dynamics model of two kinds of 4-wheel mobile robots. And also, driving efficiency of UGVs is predicted to reduce energy consumption while traversing rough terrains.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.753-757
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• 2015

This paper introduces an experimental rescue robot, HUBO T-100 and presents the optimal motion control method. The objective of the rescue robot is to extract patients or wounded soldiers in the battlefield and hazardous environments. Another mission is to dispose and transport an explosive ordnance to safe places. To execute these missions, the upper body of the rescue robot is humanoid in form to execute various kinds of tasks. The lower body features a hybrid tracked/legged design, which allows for a variety of mode of locomotion, depending on terrain conditions in order to increase traversability. The weight lifting motion is one of the most important task for performing rescue related missions because the robot must lift an object or impaired person lying on the ground for transferring. Here, dynamics based motion optimization is employed to minimize joint torques while maintaining stability simultaneously. Physical experiments with a real humanoid robot, HUBO T-100, are presented to verify the proposed method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.26-34
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• 2008

The information of traversability and path planning is essential for UGV(Unmanned Ground Vehicle) navigation. Such information can be obtained by analyzing 3D terrain. In this paper, we present the method of 3D terrain modeling with color information from a camera, precise distance information from a 2D Laser Range Finder(LRF) and wheel encoder information from mobile robot with less data. And also we present the method of 3B terrain modeling with the information from GPS/IMU and 2D LRF with less data. To fuse the color information from camera and distance information from 2D LRF, we obtain extrinsic parameters between a camera and LRF using planar pattern. We set up such a fused system on a mobile robot and make an experiment on indoor environment. And we make an experiment on outdoor environment to reconstruction 3D terrain with 2D LRF and GPS/IMU(Inertial Measurement Unit). The obtained 3D terrain model is based on points and requires large amount of data. To reduce the amount of data, we use cubic grid-based model instead of point-based model.