• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.281-285
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• 2009

Mobile robot has various sensors for describing the external world. The ultrasonic sensor widely applied to the most mobile robot to detect the obstacle and environment owing to low cost, its easy to use. However, ultrasonic sensor has major problems: the uncertainty information of sensor, false readings caused by specular reflection, multi path effect, low angular resolution and sensitivity to changes in temperature and humidity. This paper describes a sensor system for map building of mobile robot. It was made of low cost PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) sensor array and high speed RISC MPU. PSD sensor is cost effective and light weighting but its output signal has many noises. We propose heuristic S/W filter to effectively remove these noises. The developed map building sensor system was equipped on a mobile robot and was compared with ultrasonic sensor through field test.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.5_6
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• pp.689-709
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• 2010

In this paper, a low cost, low power but multifunctional wireless sensor node is presented for the impedance-based SHM using piezoelectric sensors. Firstly, a miniaturized impedance measuring chip device is utilized for low cost and low power structural excitation/sensing. Then, structural damage detection/sensor self-diagnosis algorithms are embedded on the on-board microcontroller. This sensor node uses the power harvested from the solar energy to measure and analyze the impedance data. Simultaneously it monitors temperature on the structure near the piezoelectric sensor and battery power consumption. The wireless sensor node is based on the TinyOS platform for operation, and users can take MATLAB$^{(R)}$ interface for the control of the sensor node through serial communication. In order to validate the performance of this multifunctional wireless impedance sensor node, a series of experimental studies have been carried out for detecting loose bolts and crack damages on lab-scale steel structural members as well as on real steel bridge and building structures. It has been found that the proposed sensor nodes can be effectively used for local wireless health monitoring of structural components and for constructing a low-cost and multifunctional SHM system as "place and forget" wireless sensors.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2023.05a
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• pp.172-172
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• 2023

The use of low-cost IoT sensors for flow measurement in open channels has gained significant attention due to their potential to provide continuous and real-time data at a low cost. However, the accuracy and reliability of these sensors in real-world scenarios are not well understood. This study aims to compare the performance of low-cost IoT sensors in the laboratory and real-world conditions to evaluate their accuracy and reliability. Firstly, a low-cost IoT sensor was integrated with an IoT platform to acquire real-time flow rate data. The IoT sensors were calibrated in the laboratory environment to optimize their accuracy, including different types of low-cost IoT sensors (HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor & YF-S201 sensor) using an open channel prototype. After calibration, the IoT sensors were then applied to a real-world case study in the Dorim-cheon stream, where they were compared to traditional flow measurement methods to evaluate their accuracy.The results showed that the low-cost IoT sensors provided accurate and reliable flow rate data under laboratory conditions, with an error range of less than 5%. However, when applied to the real-world case study, the accuracy of the IoT sensors decreased, which could be attributed to several factors such as the effects of water turbulence, sensor drift, and environmental factors. Overall, this study highlights the potential of low-cost IoT sensors for flow measurement in open channels and provides insights into their limitations and challenges in real-world scenarios.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.10b
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• pp.603-605
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• 2005

In this paper, we deal with a calibration method for low cost motion capture sensor using PSD (Position Sensitive Detection). The PSD sensor is employed to measure the direction of incident light from moving markers attached to motion body. To calibrate the PSD optical module, a conventional camera calibration algorithm introduced by Tsai. The 3-dimensional positions of the markers are measured by using stereo camera geometry. From the experimental results, the low cost motion capture sensor can be used in a real time system.

• 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.

• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2009

With the development of high-cost vehicle detectors, low-cost detectors have also been studied due to the advantage that more detectors are provided within limited budgets. This study proposed a method to estimate vehicle speeds using vehicles' track data from auto manufacturers and time stamps obtained when vehicles' tires pass an inclined sensor (here, a tape switch sensor). In speed estimation, small vehicles and large vehicles is distinguished according to the ratio of time stamps for a wheelbase and a rear track obtained from a tape switch sensor. In particular, speed estimation can be adjusted through a parameter to determine vehicles' size so as to take into account location properties such as vehicles' classification ratio. The low-cost vehicle detector with an inclined sensor proposed in this study is expected to be widely utilized to monitor traffic conditions thanks to low cost.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.1826-1829
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• 2005

Recent advancement in wireless communications and electronics has enabled the development of low power sensor network. Wireless sensor network are often used in remote monitoring control applications, health care, security and environmental monitoring. Wireless sensor networks are an emerging technology consisting of small, low-power, and low-cost devices that integrate limited computation, sensing, and radio communication capabilities. Sensor network platform for health care has been designed, fabricated and tested. This system consists of an embedded micro-controller, Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver, power management, I/O expansion, and serial communication (RS-232). The hardware platform uses Atmel ATmega128L 8-bit ultra low power RISC processor with 128KB flash memory as the program memory and 4KB SRAM as the data memory. The radio transceiver (Chipcon CC1000) operates in the ISM band at 433MHz or 916MHz with a maximum data rate of 76.8kbps. Also, the indoor radio range is approximately 20-30m. When many sensors have to communicate with the controller, standard communication interfaces such as Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) or Integrated Circuit ($I^{2}C$) allow sharing a single communication bus. With its low power, the smallest and low cost design, the wireless sensor network system and wireless sensing electronics to collect health-related information of human vitality and main physiological parameters (ECG, Temperature, Perspiration, Blood Pressure and some more vitality parameters, etc.)

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.103-111
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• 2021

This study addresses a low-cost lidar sensor-based glass feature extraction method for an accurate map representation using statistical moments, i.e. the mean and variance. Since the low-cost lidar sensor produces range-only data without intensity and multi-echo data, there are some difficulties in detecting glass-like objects. In this study, a principle that an incidence angle of a ray emitted from the lidar with respect to a glass surface is close to zero degrees is concerned for glass detection. Besides, all sensor data are preprocessed and clustered, which is represented using statistical moments as glass feature candidates. Glass features are selected among the candidates according to several conditions based on the principle and geometric relation in the global coordinate system. The accumulated glass features are classified according to the distance, which is lastly represented on the map. Several experiments were conducted in glass environments. The results showed that the proposed method accurately extracted and represented glass windows using proper parameters. The parameters were empirically designed and carefully analyzed. In future work, we will implement and perform the conventional SLAM algorithms combined with our glass feature extraction method in glass environments.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.845-850
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• 2009

Localization which estimates a robot's position and orientation in a given environment is very important for mobile robot navigation. 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 increasing the success rate of low-cost sensor-based localization. In this paper, both the previous and the current data obtained from the IR sensors are used for localization in order to utilize as much environment information as possible without increasing the number of sensors. The sensor model used in the monte carlo localization (MCL) is modified so that the accumulated range information may be used to increase the accuracy in estimating the current robot pose. The experimental results show that the proposed method can robustly estimate the robot's pose in indoor environments with several similar places.