• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.7-14
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• 2004

In an upcoming ubiquitous era, humankind will live in a ubiquitous space, where everything is connected through communication network. In this ubiquitous space, a ubiquitous robot, which can be used by anyone for any service through any device and any network at anytime and anywhere in a u-space, is expected to be required to serve seamless and context-aware services to humankind. In this paper, we introduce the ubiquitous robot, and define three components of the ubiquitous robot. The first one is "SoBot" which can be connected through the network in anywhere with environment recognition function and communication ability with human. The second one is "EmBot" which is embedded into environments and mobile robots and has localization and certification function with sensor fusion. The last one is "Mobile Robot" which serves overall physical services. This paper also introduces KAIST ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Center that pursues the implementation of the ubiquitous robot.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.66-71
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• 2006

Recently, there are lots of concerning on ubiquitous environment of robots and URC (Ubiquitous Robotic Companion). In this paper, a practical ubiquitous interface system far controlling mobile robots in indoor environments was proposed. The interface system was designed as a manager-agent model including a PC manager, a mobile manager, and robot agents for being able to be accessed by any network. In the system, the PC manager has a 3D virtual environment and shows real images for a human-friendly interface, and share the computation load of the robot such as path planning and managing geographical information. It also contains Hybrid Format Manager(HFM) working for transforming the image, position, and control data and interchanging them between the robots and the managers. Mobile manager working in the minimized computing condition of handsets has a mobile interface environment displaying the real images and the position of the robot and being able to control the robots by pressing keys. Experimental results showed the proposed system was able to control robots rising wired and wireless LAN and mobile Internet.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.1139-1145
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• 2008

A robust position sensing system is proposed in this paper for a ubiquitous mobile robot which moves indoors as well as outdoors. The Differential GPS (DGPS) which has a position estimation error of less than 5 m is a general solution when the mobile robot is moving outdoor, while an active beacon system (ABS) with embedded ultrasonic sensors is reliable as an indoor positioning system. The switching from the outdoor to indoor or vice versa causes unstable measurements on account of the reference coordinates and algorithm changes. To minimize the switching time in the position estimation and to stabilize the measurement, a robust position sensing system is proposed. In the system, to minimize the switching delay, the door positions are stored and updated in a database. Using the database, the approaching status of the mobile robot from indoor to outdoor or vice versa has been checked and the switching conditions are prepared before the mobile robot actually moves out or moves into the door. The reliability and accuracy of the robust positioning system based on DGPS and ABS are verified and demonstrated through the real experiments using a mobile robot prepared for this research.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.560-566
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• 2005

In this paper, a practical technique for correction of a distorted image for vision-based localization of ubiquitous mobile robot. The localization of mobile robot is essential and is realized by using camera vision system. In order to wide the view angle of camera, the vision system includes a fish-eye lens, which distorts the image. Because a mobile robot moves rapidly, the image processing should he fast to recognize the localization. Thus, we propose the practical correction technique for a distorted image, verify the Performance by experimental test.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.977-983
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• 2005

In this paper, novel ubiquitous concept of real reality robot game controlled by a mobile server robot is proposed. Real reality robot game means that two real robots controlled by humans/computers through the internet are playing a boxing game. The mobile server robot captures playing images of the boxing game and sends them to GUI on the screen of human operators' PC. The human operator can login to the boxing game from any computer in any place if he/she is permitted. Remote control of a boxing robot by a motion capture system through network is implemented. Successful motion control of a boxing robot remotely controlled by a motion capture system through network can be achieved. In addition, real boxing games between a human and a computer are demonstrated.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.221-226
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• 2007

A robust position-sensing system is proposed in this paper for ubiquitous mobile robots which move indoor as well as outdoor. The Differential GPS (DGPS) which has position estimation error of less than 5 m is a general solution when the mobile robots are moving outdoor, while an active beacon system (ABS) with embedded ultrasonic sensors is selected as an indoor positioning system. The switching from the outdoor to indoor or vice versa causes unstable measurements on account of the reference and algorithm changes. To minimize the switching time in the position estimation and to stabilize the measurement, a robust position-sensing system is proposed. In the system, to minimize the switching delay, the door positions are stored and updated in a database. The reliability and accuracy of the robust positioning system based on DGPS and ABS are verified through the real experiments using a mobile robot prepared for this research and demonstrated.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.149-155
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• 2012

This paper presents mobile robot control architecture of hierarchical behaviors, inspired by biological life. The system is reactive, highly parallel, and does not rely on representation of the environment. The behaviors of the system are designed hierarchically from the bottom-up with priority given to primitive behaviors to ensure the survivability of the robot and provide robustness to failures in higher-level behaviors. Fuzzy logic is used to perform command fusion on each behavior's output. Simulations of the proposed methodology are shown and discussed. The simulation results indicate that complex tasks can be performed by a combination of a few simple behaviors and a set of fuzzy inference rules.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.1051-1061
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• 2005

This paper proposes a ubiquitous robot, Ubibot, as an integration of three forms of robots: Software robot (Sobot), Embedded robot (Embot) and Mobile robot (Mobot). A Sobot is a virtual robot, which has the ability to move to any place or connect to any device through a network in order to overcome spatial limitations. It has the capacity to interpret the context and thus interact with the user. An Embot is embedded within the environment or within physical robots. It can recognize the locations of and authenticate the user or robot, and synthesize sensing information. Also it has the ability to deliver essential information to the user or other components of Ubibot by using various types of output devices. A Mobot provides integrated mobile service. In addition, Middleware intervenes different protocols between Sobot, Embot, and Mobot in order to incorporate them reliably. The services provided by Ubibot will be seamless, calm and context-aware based on the combination of these components. This paper presents the basic concepts and structure of Ubibot. A Sobot, called Rity, is introduced in order to investigate the usability of the proposed concepts. Rity is a 3D synthetic character which exists in the virtual world, has a unique IP address and interacts with human beings through Vision Embot, Sound Embot, Position Embot and Voice Embot. Rity is capable of moving into a Mobot and controlling its mobility. In doing so, Rity can express its behavior in the virtual world, for example, wondering or moving about in the real world. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of implementing a Ubibot in a networked environment.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2006

Ubiquitous location based services, offer helpful services anytime and anywhere by using real-time location information of objects based on ubiquitous network. Particularly, autonomous mobile robots can be a solution for various applications related to ubiquitous location based services, e.g. in hospitals, for cleaning, at airports or railway stations. However, a meaningful and still unsolved problem for most applications is to develop a robust and cheap positioning system. A typical example of position measurements is dead reckoning that is well known for providing a good short-term accuracy, being inexpensive and allowing very high sampling rates. However, the measurement always has some accumulated errors because the fundamental idea of dead reckoning is the integration of incremental motion information over time. The other hand, a localization system using RFID offers absolute position of robots regardless of elapsed time. We construct an absolute positioning system based on RFID and investigate how localization technique can be enhanced by RFID through experiment to measure the location of a mobile robot. Tags are placed on the floor at 5cm intervals in the shape of square in an arbitrary space and the accuracy of position measurement is investigated . To reduce the error and the variation of error, a weighting function based on Gaussian function is used. Different weighting values are applied to position data of tags since weighting values follow Gaussian function.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-60
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• 2008

Localization is the most important functions in mobile robots. There are so many approaches to realize this essential function in wheel based mobile robots, but it is not easy to find similar examples in small underwater robots. It is presented the sonar localization system using ubiquitous sensor network for a fish robot in this paper. A fish robot uses GPS and sonar system to find exact localization. Although GPS is essential tool to obtain positional information, this device doesn't provide reasonable resolution in localization. To obtain more precise localization information, we use several Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN) motes with sonar system. Experimental results show that a fish robot obtains more detailed positional information.