• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.450-456
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• 2006

Monte Carlo localization is known to be one of the most reliable methods for pose estimation of a mobile robot. Although MCL is capable of estimating the robot pose even for a completely unknown initial pose in the known environment, it takes considerable time to give an initial pose estimate because the number of random samples is usually very large especially for a large-scale environment. For practical implementation of MCL, therefore, a reduction in sample size is desirable. This paper presents a novel approach to reducing the number of samples used in the particle filter for efficient implementation of MCL. To this end, the topological information generated through the thinning technique, which is commonly used in image processing, is employed. The global topological map is first created from the given grid map for the environment. The robot then scans the local environment using a laser rangefinder and generates a local topological map. The robot then navigates only on this local topological edge, which is likely to be similar to the one obtained off-line from the given grid map. Random samples are drawn near the topological edge instead of being taken with uniform distribution all over the environment, since the robot traverses along the edge. Experimental results using the proposed method show that the number of samples can be reduced considerably, and the time required for robot pose estimation can also be substantially decreased without adverse effects on the performance of MCL.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.125-132
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• 2008

This paper describes a mobile inspection robot with an automatic pipe tracking system for a feeder pipe inspection in a PHWR. The robot is composed of two inch worm mechanisms. One is for a longitudinal motion along a pipe, and the other is for a rotational motion in a circumferential direction to access all of the outer surfaces of a pipe. The proposed mechanism has a stable gripping capability and is easy to install. An automatic pipe tracking system is proposed based on machine vision techniques to make the mobile robot follow an exact outer circumference of a curved feeder pipe as closely as possible, which is one of the requirements of a thickness measurement system for a feeder pipe. The proposed sensing technique is analyzed to attain its feasibility and to develop a calibration method for an accurate measurement. A mobile robot and control system are developed, and the automatic pipe tracking system is tested in a mockup of a feeder pipe.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.989-994
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• 2011

This study aims to demonstrate the feasibility of a visual servoing-based paired structured light (SL) robot for estimating structural displacement under various external loads. The former paired SL robot, which was proposed in the previous study, was composed of two screens facing with each other, each with one or two lasers and a camera. It was found that the paired SL robot could estimate the translational and rotational displacement each in 3-DOF with high accuracy and low cost. However, the measurable range is fairly limited due to the limited screen size. In this paper, therefore, a visual servoing-based 2-DOF manipulator which controls the pose of lasers is introduced. By controlling the positions of the projected laser points to be on the screen, the proposed robot can estimate the displacement regardless of the screen size. We performed various simulations and experimental tests to verify the performance of the newly proposed robot. The results show that the proposed system overcomes the range limitation of the former system and it can be utilized to accurately estimate the structural displacement.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.10
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• pp.964-969
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• 2012

Robot hands capable of grasping or handling various objects are important for service robots to effectively aid humans. In particular, controlling a contact force and providing a compliant motion are essential when the hand is in contact with objects. Many dexterous robot hands equipped with force/torque sensors have been developed to perform force control, but they suffer from the complexity of control and high cost. In this paper, a low-cost robot hand based on SEA (Series Elastic Actuator), which is composed of compression spring, stretch sensor, and wire, is proposed. The grasping force can be estimated by measuring the compression length of spring, which would allow the hand to perform force control. A series of experimentations are carried out to verify the performance of force control of the proposed robot hand, and it is shown that it can successfully control the contact force without any additional force/torque sensors.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.368-374
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• 2011

This paper proposes a robot control human interface using Markov model (HMM) based hand signal recognizer. The command receiving humanoid robot sends webcam images to a client computer. The client computer then extracts the intended commanding hum n's hand motion descriptors. Upon the feature acquisition, the hand signal recognizer carries out the recognition procedure. The recognition result is then sent back to the robot for responsive actions. The system performance is evaluated by measuring the recognition of '48 hand signal set' which is created randomly using fundamental hand motion set. For isolated motion recognition, '48 hand signal set' shows 97.07% recognition rate while the 'baseline hand signal set' shows 92.4%. This result validates the proposed hand signal recognizer is indeed highly discernable. For the '48 hand signal set' connected motions, it shows 97.37% recognition rate. The relevant experiments demonstrate that the proposed system is promising for real world human-robot interface application.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.10
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• pp.1051-1056
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• 2014

In this paper, we introduce an intelligent robotic arc welding system which exploits sensors like as LVS (Laser Vision Sensor), Hall effect sensor, voltmeter and so on. The use of industrial robot is saturated because of its own limitation, and one of the major limitations is that industrial robot cannot recognize the environment. Lately, sensor-based environmental awareness research of the industrial robot is performed actively to overcome such limitation, and it can expand application field and improve productivity. We classify the sensor-based intelligent arc welding robot system by the goal and the sensing data. The goals can be categorized into detection of a welding start point, tracking of a welding line and correction of a torch deformation. The Sensing data can be categorized into welding data (i.e. current, voltage and short circuit detection) and displacement data (i.e. distance, position). This paper covers not only the explanation of the each category but also its advantage and limitation.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.12-18
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• 2010

This paper proposes an adaptive robust fuzzy control scheme for path tracking of a wheeled mobile robot with uncertainties. The robot dynamics including the actuator dynamics is considered in this work. The presented controller is composed of a fuzzy basis function network (FBFN) to approximate an unknown nonlinear function of the robot complete dynamics, an adaptive robust input to overcome the uncertainties, and a stabilizing control input. Genetic algorithms are employed to optimize the fuzzy rules of FBFN. The stability and the convergence of the tracking errors are guaranteed using the Lyapunov stability theory. When the controller is designed, the different parameters for two actuator models in the dynamic equation are taken into account. The proposed control scheme does not require the accurate parameter values for the actuator parameters as well as the robot parameters. The validity and robustness of the proposed control scheme are demonstrated through computer simulations.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.585-591
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• 2003

A virtual force is generated and fed back to the operator to make the teleoperation more reliable, which reflects the relationship between a slave robot and an uncertain remote environment as a form of an impedance. In general, for the teleoperation, the teleoperated mobile robot takes pictures of the remote environment and sends the visual information back to the operator over the Internet. Because of the limitations of communication bandwidth and narrow view-angles of camera, it is not possible to watch certain regions, for examples, the shadow and curved areas. To overcome this problem, a virtual force is generated according to both the distance between the obstacle and the robot and the approaching velocity of the obstacle w.r.t the collision vector based on the ultrasonic sensor data. This virtual force is transferred back to the master (two degrees of freedom joystick) over the Internet to enable a human operator to estimate the position of obstacle at the remote site. By holding this master, in spite of limited visual information, the operator can feel the spatial sense against the remote environment. It is demonstrated by experiments that this collision vector based haptic reflection improves the performance of teleoperated mobile robot significantly.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.6 no.7
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• pp.568-577
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• 2000

In this paper for an object grasped by a robot hand to work in stiffness control domain we first investigate the number of fingers for successful stiffness modulation in the object operational space. Next we propose a new compliance control method for robot hands which consist of two steps. RIFDS(Resolved Inter-Finger Decoupling Solver) is to decompose the desired compliance characteristic specified in the op-erational space into the compliance characteristic in the fingertip space without inter-finger coupling and RIJDS(Resolved Inter-Joint Decoupling Solver) is to decompose the fingertip space without inter-finger coupling and RIJDS(Resolved inter-Joint Decoupling Solver) is to decompose the compliance characteristic in the finger-tip space into the compliance characteristic given in the joint space without inter-joint coupling. Based on the analysis results the finger structure should be biominetic in the sense that either kniematic redundancy or force redundancy are required to implement the proposed compliance control scheme, Five-bar fingered robot hands are used as an illustrative example to implement the proposed compliance control method. To show the effectiveness of the proposed compliance control method simulations are performed for two-fingered and three-fingered robot hands.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.86-100
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• 2008

Most of the previously employed dynamic modeling approaches, including Natural Orthogonal Complement Algorithm, have limitations on their application to the mobile robot, specifically at singular configurations. Also, in their dynamic modeling of mobile robots, wheel dynamics is usually ignored assuming that its dynamic effect is negligibly small. As a remedy for this, a singularity-free operational space dynamic modeling approach based on Lagrange's form of the D' Alembert principle is proposed, and the singularity-free characteristic of the proposed dynamic modeling is discussed in the process of analytical derivation of the proposed dynamic model. Then an accurate dynamic model taking into account the wheel dynamics of the omni-directional mobile robot is derived, and through simulation it is manifested that the effect of the wheel dynamics on the whole dynamic model of the mobile robot may not be negligible, but rather in some cases it is significantly large, possibly affecting the operational performances of dynamic model-based control algorithms. Lastly, the importance of its accurate dynamic model is further illustrated through impulse analysis and its simulation for the mobile robot.