• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.8 no.8
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• pp.665-672
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• 2002

This paper deals with the human-interactive actions of a quadruped robot by using Genetic Algorithm. In case we have to work out the designed plan under the special environments, our robot will be required to have walking capability, and patterns with legs, which are designed like gaits of insect, dog and human. Our quadruped robot (called SERO) is capable of not only the basic actions operated with sensors and actuators but also the various advanced actions including walking trajectories, which are generated by Genetic Algorithm. In this paper, the body and the controller structures are proposed and kinematics analysis are performed. All of the suggested motions of SERO are generated by PC simulation and implemented in real environment successfully.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.108-115
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• 2011

This paper describes a new sensor system for mobile robot motion estimation using stereo infrared light sources and a camera. Visibility is being applied to robotic obstacle avoidance path planning and localization. Using simple visibility computation, the environment is partitioned into many visibility sectors. Based on the recognized edges, the sector a robot belongs to is identified and this greatly reduces the search area for localization. Geometric modeling of the vision system enables the estimation of the characteristic pixel position with respect to the robot movement. Finite difference analysis is used for incremental movement and the error sources are investigated. With two characteristic points in the image such as vertices, the robot position and orientation are successfully estimated.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.916-921
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• 2011

Mobile robot localization is the task of estimating the robot pose in a given environment. This research deals with outdoor localization based on an elevation map. Since outdoor environments are large and contain many complex objects, it is difficult to robustly estimate the robot pose. This paper proposes a Hausdorff distance-based map matching method. The Hausdorff distance is exploited to measure the similarity between extracted features obtained from the robot and elevation map. The experiments and simulations show that the proposed Hausdorff distance-based map matching is useful for robust outdoor localization using an elevation map. Also, it can be easily applied to other probabilistic approaches such as a Markov localization method.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.445-450
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• 2009

This paper presents a new mobile robot localization method for indoor robot navigation. The method uses hexagon distributed color-coded patches on the ceiling and a camera is installed on the robot facing the ceiling to recognize these patches. The proposed "cell-coded map", with the use of only seven different kinds of color-coded landmarks distributed in hexagonal way, helps reduce the complexity of the landmark structure and the error of landmark recognition. This technique is applicable for navigation in an unlimited size of indoor space. The structure of the landmarks and the recognition method are introduced. And 2 rigid rules are also used to ensure the correctness of the recognition. Experimental results prove that the method is useful.

• 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.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.1130-1138
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• 2008

A mobile robot should be designed to navigate with collision avoidance capability in the real world, coping with the changing environment flexibly. In this paper, a novel navigation method is proposed for fast moving mobile robots using limit-cycle characteristics of the 2nd-order nonlinear function. It can be applied to robots in dynamically changing environment such as the robot soccer. By adjusting the radius of the motion circle and the direction of the obstacle avoidance, the mobile robot can avoid the collision with obstacles and move to the destination point. To demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability, it is applied to the robot soccer. Simulations and real experiments ascertain the merits of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.39-44
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• 1998

Determining the absolute location of a mobile robot is essential in the navigation of a mobile robot. In this paper, a method to determine the position of a mobile robot through the visual image of a landrnark using neural networks is proposed. In determining the position of a mobile robot on the world coordinate, there is a position error because of uncertainty in pixels, incorrect camera calibration and lens distortion. To reduce the errors, a method using a BPNN(Back Propagation Neural Network) is proposed. The experimental results are presented to illustrate the superiority of the proposed method when comparing with the conventional methods.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.595-601
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• 2005

A mobile robot system utilizing NDT (Non-Destructive Testing) method is designed and fabricated f3r automatic integrity evaluation of large sized industrial reservoirs and pipelines. The developed mobile robot can crawl over the outer surface of the industrial facilities even though the shape of the structures is various and unsymmetric. The robot detects defects such as pinholes, cracks and thickness reduction at the wall of the facilities using EMAT (Electro-Magnetic Acoustic Transducer). Image processing technology for weld line detection at the surface of the target and host programs including defect detecting algorithms are also developed. Automation of defect detection for these kinds of large facilities using mobile robots is helpful to prevent significant troubles of the structures without danger of human beings under harmful environment.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.571-578
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• 2012

In the paper, we proposed a ring type structured light image based embedded ranging sensor for a mobile robot. Since the proposed ranging sensor obtains omnidirectional object distance, it is useful for autonomous navigation of a mobile robot. By matching the local omnidirectional distance map with a given global object map, it is possible to get position and heading angle of mobile robot in the global coordinates. Experiments for matching and navigation were carried out to verify the performance of the proposed ranging sensor.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.1240-1245
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• 2009

The throughput characteristics of the cluster tool with dual blade robot are analyzed. Using equipment's cycle time chart of the equipment, simple analytic form of the throughput is derived. Then, several important throughput characteristics are analyzed by the throughput formula. First, utilization of the process chamber and the robot are maximized by assigning the equipment to the process whose processing time is near the critical process time. Second, rule for selecting optimal number of process chambers is suggested. It is desirable to select a single process chamber plus a single robot structure for relatively short time process and multi process chambers plus a single robot, namely cluster tool for relatively long time process. Third, throughput variation between equipments due to the wafer transfer time variation is analyzed, especially for the process whose processing time is less than critical process time. And the throughput and the wafer transfer time of the equipments in our fabrication line are measured and compared to the analysis.