• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.323-333
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• 2011

Due to the limited pendulum motion range, the conventional one-pendulum driven spherical robot has limited driving capability. Especially it can not drive parallel direction with center horizontal axis to which pendulum is attached from stationary state. To overcome the limited driving capability of one-pendulum driven spherical robot, we introduce a spherical robot, called KisBot II, with a new type of curved two-pendulum driving mechanism. A cross-shape frame of the robot is located horizontally in the center of the robot. The main axis of the frame is connected to the outer shell, and each curved pendulum is connected to the end of the other axis of the frame respectively. The main axis and pendulums can rotate 360 degrees inside the sphere orthogonally without interfering with each other, also the two pendulums can rotate identically or independent of each other. Due to this driving mechanism, KisBot II has various motion generation abilities, including a fast steering, turning capability in place and during travelling, and four directions including forward, backward, left, and right from stationary status. Experiments for several motions verify the driving efficiency of the proposed spherical robot.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.220-229
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• 2011

This paper focuses on a development of an anthropomorphic robot hand. Human hand is able to dexterously grasp and manipulate various objects with not accurate and sufficient, but inaccurate and scarce information of target objects. In order to realize the ability of human hand, we develop a robot hand and introduce a control scheme for stable grasping by using only kinematic information. The developed anthropomorphic robot hand, KITECH Hand, has one thumb and three fingers. Each of them has 4 DOF and a soft hemispherical finger tip for flexible opposition and rolling on object surfaces. In addition to a thumb and finger, it has a palm module composed the non-slip pad to prevent slip phenomena between the object and palm. The introduced control scheme is a quitely simple based on the principle of virtual work, which consists of transposed Jacobian, joint angular position, and velocity obtained by joint angle measurements. During interaction between the robot hand and an object, the developed robot hand shows compliant grasping motions by the back-drivable characteristics of equipped actuator modules. To validate the feasibility of the developed robot hand and introduced control scheme, collective experiments are carried out with the developed robot hand, KITECH Hand.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.229-237
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• 2013

In this paper, we report a self-balancing robot wheelchair which has the capability of keeping upright posture regardless of the terrain inclination in terms of the three dimensional balancing motion. It has the mobility of five degrees of freedom, where pitching, yawing, and forward motions are generated by the two-wheeled inverted pendulum mechanism and the rolling and vertical motions are implemented by the movement of the tilting mechanism. Several design considerations are suggested for the sliding type vehicle body, wheel actuator module, tilting actuator module, power and control system, and the riding module.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and information Science
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• v.2 no.6
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• pp.177-182
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• 1997

A visual servoing method is proposed for a robot with a camera in hand. Specifically, vanishing point features are suggested by employing a viewing model of perspective projection to calculate the relative rolling, pitching and yawing angles between the object and the camera. To compensate dynamic characteristics of the robot, desired feature trajectories for the learning of visually guided line-of-sight robot motion are obtained by measuring features by the camera in hand not in the entire workspace, but on a single linear path along which the robot moves under the control of a commercially provided function of linear motion. And then, control actions of the camera are approximately found by fuzzy-neural networks to follow such desired feature trajectories. To show the validity of proposed algorithm, some experimental results are illustrated, where a four axis SCARA robot with a B/W CCD camera is used.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.349-358
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• 2010

We presents a dynamic modeling of 4-wheel 2-DOF. WMR. The classic dynamic model utilizes a greatly simplified wheel motion representation and using of a simplified dynamic model confronts with a problem for accurate position control of wheeled mobile robot. In this paper, we treats the dynamic model for describes relationship between the wheel actuator force/torque and WMR motion through the use of Newton's equilibrium laws. To calculate the WMR position in real time, we introduced the Dead-Reckoning algorithms and the simulation result show that the proposed dynamic model is useful. We can be easily extend the proposed WMR model to mobile robot of similar type and this type of methodology is useful to analyze, design and control any kinds of rolling robots.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.188-196
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• 2016

For the balancing control of a one-wheel mobile robot, CMG (Control Moment Gyro) can be used as a gyroscopic actuator. Balancing control has to be done in the roll angle direction by an induced gyroscopic motion. Since the dedicated CMG cannot produce the rolling motion of the body directly, the yawing motion with the help of the frictional reaction can be used. The dynamic uncertainties including the chattering of the control input, disturbances, and vibration during the flipping control of the high rotating flywheel, however, cause ill effect on the balancing performance and even lead to the instability of the system. Fuzzy compensation is introduced as an auxiliary control method to prevent the robot from the failure due to leaning aside of the flywheel. Simulation studies are conducted to see the feasibility of the proposed control method. In addition, experimental studies are conducted for the verification of the proposed control.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.1431-1442
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• 2003

A new method of estimating the pose of a mobile-task robot is developed based upon an active calibration scheme. The utility of a mobile-task robot is widely recognized, which is formed by the serial connection of a mobile robot and a task robot. To be an efficient and precise mobile-task robot, the control uncertainties in the mobile robot should be resolved. Unless the mobile robot provides an accurate and stable base, the task robot cannot perform various tasks. For the control of the mobile robot, an absolute position sensor is necessary. However, on account of rolling and slippage of wheels on the ground, there does not exist any reliable position sensor for the mobile robot. This paper proposes an active calibration scheme to estimate the pose of a mobile robot that carries a task robot on the top. The active calibration scheme is to estimate a pose of the mobile robot using the relative position/orientation to a known object whose location, size, and shape are known a priori. For this calibration, a camera is attached on the top of the task robot to capture the images of the objects. These images are used to estimate the pose of the camera itself with respect to the known objects. Through the homogeneous transformation, the absolute position/orientation of the camera is calculated and propagated to get the pose of a mobile robot. Two types of objects are used here as samples of work-pieces: a polygonal and a cylindrical object. With these two samples, the proposed active calibration scheme is verified experimentally.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.26 no.10
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• pp.47-55
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• 2009

In this study, a robot foot having toes for firm stepping on uneven surface is proposed. The toes are connected to the lower leg by parallel links so that the lower leg can rotate in the rolling and pitching directions during stance phase without ankle joint. The landing performance of the foot on uneven surface was evaluated by relative comparison with that of the most common foot making point contact with the walking surface, since the test conditions considering real uneven surface could be hardly defined for its objective evaluation. Anti-slip margin(ASM) was defined in this study to express the slip resistance of a robot foot when it lands on a projection with half circular-, triangular- or rectangular cross section, assuming that uneven surface consists of projections having these kind of cross sections in different sizes. Based on the ASM analysis, the slip conditions for the two feet were experimentally confirmed. The results showed that the slip resistance of the new foot is not only higher than that of the conventional point contact type foot but also less sensitive to the surface friction coefficient.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.44 no.4 s.316
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• pp.35-41
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• 2007

In this paper a single-wheeled robot called GYROBO is built and its hardware is implemented. The single-wheeled robot is similar to a rolling disk relying on gyroscopic motions to maintain its balance. The GYROBO consists of three actuators: a spin motor a tilt motor, and a drive motor. The spin motor spins a flywheel at a high rate so that it provides the balancing stability to upright the robot. The tilt motor controls steering of the robot by gyroscopic effect. The drive motor makes forward accelerated motion to the robot. Several models are designed. Experimental works of the GYROBO to turn and move forward have been presented.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.500-507
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• 2022

In this study, a motion planning method based on the integer representation of contact status between wheels and the ground is proposed for planning swing motion of a 6×6 wheel-legged robot to cross large obstacles and gaps. Wheel-legged robots can drive on a flat road by wheels and overcome large obstacles by legs. Autonomously crossing large obstacles requires the robot to perform complex motion planning of multi-contacts and wheel-rolling at the same time. The lift-off and touch-down status of wheels and the trajectories of legs should be carefully planned to avoid collision between the robot body and the obstacle. To address this issue, we propose a planning method for swing motion of robot legs. It combines an integer representation of discrete contact status and a trajectory optimization based on the direct collocation method, which results in a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. The planned motion is used to control the joint angles of the articulated legs. The proposed method is verified by the MuJoCo simulation and shows that over 95% and 83% success rate when the height of vertical obstacles and the length of gaps are equal to or less than 1.68 times of the wheel radius and 1.44 times of the wheel diameter, respectively.