• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.1102-1107
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• 2009

An ultrasonic sensor has been widely used as a range sensor for its low cost and capability of detecting some obstacles, such as glasses and black surfaces, which are not well detected by a laser scanner and an IR sensor. Although low-cost sensors are preferred for practical service robots, they suffer from the inaccurate and insufficient range information. This paper proposes a novel approach to obstacle avoidance using low-cost anisotropic ultrasonic sensors with wide beam angle. In this paper, obstacles can be detected by the proposed sensor configuration which consists of one transmitter and three receivers. Because even wide obstacles are represented by a point, which corresponds to the intersection of range data from each receiver of the anisotropic sensor, a robot cannot avoid wide obstacles successfully. This paper exploits the probabilistic mapping technique to avoid collision with various types of obstacles. The experimental results show that the proposed method can robustly avoid obstacles in most indoor environments.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.703-710
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• 2012

A structural health monitoring technique for locating impact position in a composite plate is presented in this paper. The method employs a single sensor and spatial focusing properties of time reversal(TR) and inverse filtering(IF). We first examine the spatial focusing efficiency of both approaches at the impact position and its surroundings through impact experiments. The imaging results of impact localization show that the impact location can be accurately estimated in any position of the plate. Compared to existing techniques for locating impact or acoustic emission source, the proposed method has the benefits of using a single sensor and not requiring knowledge of anisotropic material properties and geometry of structures. Furthermore, it does not depend on a particular mode of dispersive Lamb waves that is frequently used in other ultrasonic testing of plate-like structures.