• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.490-495
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• 2015

As flying robots are becoming popular, there are increased needs to use themforsuch purposes as parcel delivery, serving in restaurants, and stage performances. To control flying robots such as quad copters, localization is essential. In order to properly position flying robots, many techniques are in development, including IR (infra-red)-based systemswhich catch markers on a flying robot in order that it can position itself. However, this technique demonstrates only short coverage. Furthermore, localization from inertial sensors diverges as time passes. For this reason, this paper suggests a TWR (two-way ranging) based positioning technique. Despite the weaknesses in currently available TWR system, this paper suggests a self-positioning and outlier detection technique in order to provide reliable position information with a faster update rate. The self-positioning system sends a shorter message which reduces wireless traffic. By detecting and removing outlier measurements, a positioning result with better accuracy is acquired. Finally, this paper shows that the suggesting system detects outlierssequentially from less than half the number of anchors in localization system according to the degree of outlier in measurement and the noise level. By performing an outlier algorithm, better positioning accuracy is acquired as shown in the experimental result.

• KIEE International Transaction on Electrical Machinery and Energy Conversion Systems
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• v.5B no.1
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• pp.63-69
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• 2005

The motion of animals and gymnasts in the air as well as free flying space robots without thrusters are subjected to nonholonomic constraints generated by the law of conservation of angular momentum. The purpose of this paper is to derive analytical posture control laws for free flying objects in the air. We propose the bang-bang control method for trajectory planning of a 3 link mechanical system with initial angular momentum. This technique is used to reduce the DOF (degrees of freedom) at first switching phase and to determine the control inputs to steer the reduced order system to the desired position. Computer simulations for motion planning of an athlete approximated by 3 link, namely platform diving, are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

• Transactions on Control, Automation and Systems Engineering
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.176-187
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• 2002

This paper focuses on the study of simulation and evolution of Micro Air Vehicles. Micro Air Vehicles or MAVs are small flying robots that are used for surveillance, search and rescue, and other missions. The simulated robots are designed based on realistic characteristics and the brains (controllers) of the robots are generated using genetic algorithms, i .e., simulated evolution. The objective for the experiments is to investigate the effects of robot team size and topology (simulation environment) on the evolution of simulated robots. The testing of team sizes deals with finding an ideal number of robots to be deployed for a given mission. The goal of the topology experiments is to see if there is an ideal topology (environment) to evolve the robots in order to increase their utility in most environments. We compare the results of the various experiments by evaluating the fitness values of the robots i .e., performance measure. In addition, evolved robot teams are tested in different situation in order to determine if the results can be generalized, and statistical analysis is performed to evaluate the evolved results.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.1092-1097
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• 2014

Unmanned flying robots have been used recently in many difficult situations. One of the major issues in this area is the problem of how long these unmanned flying robots can perform a given task successfully. For this, the development of a light body and high-efficiency power supply has been executed widely, but we do not as yet have the complete solution. In this paper, we propose a form of Multi-Copter X8, which can transform into other types to further improve these problems. The proposed robot has a 3-type modification capability, which can produce a more enhanced energy saving effect by reducing power consumption.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.526-534
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• 2003

Motions of animals and gymnasts in the air as well as free flying space robots without thruster are subject to nonholonomic constraints generated by the law of conservation of angular momentum. The interest in nonholonomic control problems is motivated by the fact that such systems can not stabilized to its equilibrium points by the smooth control input. The purpose of this paper is to derive analytical posture control laws for free flying objects in the air. We propose a control method using bang-bang control for trajectory planning of a 3 link mechanical system with initial angular momentum. We reduce the DOF (degrees of freedom) of control object in the first control phase and determine the control inputs to steer the reduced order system from its initial position to its desired position. Computer simulation for a motion planning of an athlete approximated by 3 link is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the Proposed control scheme.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.86-93
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• 2017

The Expanded Guide Circle (EGC) method has been originally proposed as the guidance navigation method for improving the efficiency of the remote operation using the sensory information. The previous algorithm is, however, concerned only for the omni-directional mobile robot, so it needs to suggest a suitable one for a mobile robot with non-holonomic constraints. The ego-kinematic transform is a method to map points of $R^2$ into the ego-kinematic space which implicitly represents non-holonomic constraints for admissible paths. Thus, robots with non-holonomic constraints in the ego-kinematic space can be considered as "free-flying object". In this paper, we propose an effective obstacle avoidance method for mobile robots with non-holonomic constraints by applying EGC method in the ego-kinematic space using the ego-kinematic transformation. This proposed method shows that it works better for non-holonomic mobile robots such as differential-drive robot than the original one. The simulation results show its effectiveness of performance.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.12
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• pp.1196-1203
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• 2014

Recently, UFRs (Unmanned Flying Robots) have begun to be utilized in various areas for civilian and military applications. Due to this increased utilization, accidents involving UFRsare also increasing. To prevent or monitor accidents caused by UFRs, high-accuracy positioning information is one of the most important technical elements. This paper proposes an efficient UFR monitoring system which provides accurate UFR positioning information with low-cost onboard elements; a small ARM module based on an embedded Linux operating system, a low-cost single frequency GPS receiver with a cheap patch antenna, and a versatile wireless network interface module. The ground monitoring system employs a dual frequency GPS receiver to generate exact UFR coordinates with cm-level accuracy. By processing the UFR measurements based on the Inverse RTK (Real Time Kinematic) method, the ground monitoring system determines the cm-level accurate coordinates of the UFR. The feasibility of the proposed UFR monitoring system was evaluated by three experiments in terms of data loss and accuracy.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.97-107
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• 2011

This paper describes efficient flight control algorithms for building a reconfigurable ad-hoc wireless sensor networks between nodes on the ground and airborne nodes mounted on autonomous vehicles to increase the operational range of an aerial robot or the communication connectivity. Two autonomous flight control algorithms based on adaptive gradient climbing approach are developed to steer the aerial vehicles to reach optimal locations for the maximum communication throughputs in the airborne sensor networks. The first autonomous vehicle control algorithm is presented for seeking the source of a scalar signal by directly using the extremum-seeking based forward surge control approach with no position information of the aerial vehicle. The second flight control algorithm is developed with the angular rate command by integrating an adaptive gradient climbing technique which uses an on-line gradient estimator to identify the derivative of a performance cost function. They incorporate the network performance into the feedback path to mitigate interference and noise. A communication propagation model is used to predict the link quality of the communication connectivity between distributed nodes. Simulation study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed reconfigurable airborne wireless networking control algorithms.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.637-648
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• 2007

This paper presents a sensor fusion method based on indirect Kalman filter(IKF) for error compensation of low-cost inertial sensors and its application to the determination of attitude and position of small flying robots. First, the analysis of the measurement error characteristics to zero input is performed, focusing on the bias due to the temperature variation, to derive a simple nonlinear bias model of low-cost inertial sensors. Moreover, from the experimental results that the coefficients of this bias model possess non-deterministic (stochastic) uncertainties, the bias of low-cost inertial sensors is characterized as consisting of both deterministic and stochastic bias terms. Then, IKF is derived to improve long term stability dominated by the stochastic bias error, fusing low-cost inertial sensor measurements compensated by the deterministic bias model with non-inertial sensor measurement. In addition, in case of using intermittent non-inertial sensor measurements due to the unreliable data link, the upper and lower bounds of the state estimation error covariance matrix of discrete-time IKF are analyzed by solving stochastic algebraic Riccati equation and it is shown that they are dependant on the throughput of the data link and sampling period. To evaluate the performance of proposed method, experimental results of IKF for the attitude determination of a small flying robot are presented in comparison with that of extended Kaman filter which compensates only deterministic bias error model.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.837-844
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• 2012

We introduce a pattern generation method for a hopping one-legged robot and verify it experimentally. The pattern is derived from the liner and angular momentum of a COM (Center of Mass), which are pre-scheduled. Because of the relation between angular velocities of joints and momemtums of the COM, joint angle trajectories are easily obtained. In addition, the landing impact force is reduced by only adjusting the landing timing. In the experiment, the one-legged robot hops in place with 0.06 s of flying time, and makes continuous hopping. Based on our experimental results, the proposed method can be applied to hopping and running of biped humanoid robots.