• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
• /
• 2011.07a
• /
• pp.1780-1781
• /
• 2011

There have been numerous studies on application of robots to in-pipe inspection system. In this thesis, a mobile robot that can move through elbows and vertical pipes having diameter 100mm is developed. Defect detection technology for locating wall-thinnings, corrosions and foreign materials is developed for high temperature and pressure pipings in thermal power plants, utilizing laser sensors installed on the robot. Actual defect detection performance is evaluated with application of the developed robot system to a mock-up pipings.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
• /
• v.17 no.5
• /
• pp.643-653
• /
• 2014

High-capacity video, control and situation awareness data should be transmitted efficiently to control robots properly in the ground unmanned system, which requires the technology maximizing the communication range and the data transmission throughput. This technology is connected to the OFDMA(Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access)-MIMO(Multiple Input Multiple Output) transmission technology under the limited bandwidth and transmission power. In this paper, we design MIMO communication system for ground unmanned systems, and investigate the data reception performance experimentally, comparing with SISO(Single Input Single Output) system. Experiment results show that the data reception performance of MIMO is significantly improved compared to that of SISO, e.g. 4dB gain of sensitivity and 5dB of SNR at the value MPR = 1, for the mobile stations with $2{\times}2$ STBC diversity.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.224-229
• /
• 2007

This paper presents a camera calibration method using several images for three dimensional measurement applications such as stereo systems, mobile robots, and visual inspection systems in factories. Conventional calibration methods that use single image suffer from errors related to reference point extraction in image, lens distortion, and numerical analysis of nonlinear optimization. The camera parameter values obtained from images of same camera is not same even though we use same calibration method. The camera parameters that are obtained from several images of different view for a calibration target is usaully not same with large error values and we can not assume a special probabilistic distribution when we estimate the parameter values. In this paper, the median value of camera parameters from several images is used to improve estimation of the camera values in an iterative step with nonlinear optimization. The proposed method is proved by experiments using real images.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.12 no.9
• /
• pp.843-849
• /
• 2006

Intelligent Space defines an environment where many intelligent devices, such as computers and sensors, are distributed. As a result of the cooperation between smart devices, intelligence emerges from the environment. In such scheme, a crucial task is to obtain the global location of every device in order to of for the useful services. Some tracking systems often prepare the models of the objects in advance. It is difficult to adopt this model-based solution as the tracking system when many kinds of objects exist. In this paper the location is achieved with no prior model, using color properties as information source. Feature vectors of multiple objects using color histogram and tracking method are described. The proposed method is applied to the intelligent environment and its performance is verified by the experiments.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
• /
• v.4 no.4
• /
• pp.257-264
• /
• 2009

This paper proposes a novel face detection method that finds tiny faces located at a long range even with low-resolution input images captured by a mobile robot. The proposed approach can locate extremely small-sized face regions of $12{\times}12$ pixels. We solve a tiny face detection problem by organizing a system that consists of multiple detectors including a mean-shift color tracker, short- and long-rage face detectors, and an omega shape detector. The proposed method adopts the long-range face detector that is well trained enough to detect tiny faces at a long range, and limiting its operation to only within a search region that is automatically determined by the mean-shift color tracker and the omega shape detector. By focusing on limiting the face search region as much as possible, the proposed method can accurately detect tiny faces at a long distance even with a low-resolution image, and decrease false positives sharply. According to the experimental results on realistic databases, the performance of the proposed approach is at a sufficiently practical level for various robot applications such as face recognition of non-cooperative users, human-following, and gesture recognition for long-range interaction.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
• /
• v.39 no.6
• /
• pp.549-559
• /
• 2015

In this paper, an efficient dynamic reactive motion planning method for an autonomous vehicle in a dynamic environment is proposed. The purpose of the proposed method is to improve the robustness of autonomous robot motion planning capabilities within dynamic, uncertain environments by integrating a virtual plane-based reactive motion planning technique with a sensor fusion-based obstacle detection approach. The dynamic reactive motion planning method assumes a local observer in the virtual plane, which allows the effective transformation of complex dynamic planning problems into simple stationary ones proving the speed and orientation information between the robot and obstacles. In addition, the sensor fusion-based obstacle detection technique allows the pose estimation of moving obstacles using a Kinect sensor and sonar sensors, thus improving the accuracy and robustness of the reactive motion planning approach. The performance of the proposed method was demonstrated through not only simulation studies but also field experiments using multiple moving obstacles in hostile dynamic environments.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
• /
• v.27 no.2
• /
• pp.60-69
• /
• 2010

Lookup-Table (LUT) based fuzzy controller for obstacle avoidance enhances operations faster in multiple obstacles environment. An LUT based fuzzy controller with Positive/Negative (P/N) fuzzy rule base consisting of 18 rules was introduced in our paper$^1$ and this paper shows a 50-rule P/N fuzzy controller for enhancing performance in obstacle avoidance. As a rule, the more rules are necessary, the more buffers are required. This paper suggests LUT sharing method in order to reduce LUT buffer size without significant degradation of performance. The LUT sharing method makes buffer size independent of the whole fuzzy system's complexity. Simulation using MSRDS(MicroSoft Robotics Developer Studio) evaluates the proposed method, and in order to investigate its performance, experiments are carried out to Pioneer P3-DX in the LabVIEW environment. The simulation and experiments show little difference between the fully valued LUT-based method and the LUT sharing method in operation times. On the other hand, LUT sharing method reduced its buffer size by about 95% of full valued LUT-based design.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.20 no.8
• /
• pp.1537-1545
• /
• 2016

In real time video sequence, object segmentation and tracking method are actively applied in various application tasks, such as surveillance system, mobile robots, augmented reality. This paper propose a robust object tracking method. The background models are constructed by learning the initial part of each video sequences. After that, the moving objects are detected via object segmentation by using background subtraction method. The region of detected objects are continuously tracked by using the HSV color histogram with particle filter. The proposed segmentation method is superior to average background model in term of moving object detection. In addition, the proposed tracking method provide a continuous tracking result even in the case that multiple objects are existed with similar color, and severe occlusion are occurred with multiple objects. The experiment results provided with 85.9 % of average object overlapping rate and 96.3% of average object tracking rate using two video sequences.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.18 no.5
• /
• pp.624-631
• /
• 2008

This paper presents a method for a mobile robot to follow a moving object in real time. The robot follows a target object keeping the facing angle toward the target and the distance to the target to given value. The method consists of two procedures: first, the detection of target position in the robot coordinate system, and the second, the calculation of translational velocity and rotational velocity to follow the object:. To detect the target location, range sensor data is represented in histogram. Based on the real time calculation of the location of the target relative to the robot, translational velocity and rotational velocity to follow the target are calculated. The velocities make the heading angle and the distance to target converge toward the desired ones. The performance of the method is tested through simulation. In the simulation, the target moves with three different trajectories, straight line trajectory, rectangular trajectory, and circular trajectory. As shown in the results, it is inevitable to lose track temporarily of the target when the target suddenly changes its motion direction. Nevertheless, the robot speeds up to catch up and finally succeeds to follow the target as soon as possible even in this case. The proposed method can also be utilized to coordinate the motion of multiple robots to keep their formation as well as to follow a target.