Autonomous mobile robots based on the Web have been already used in public places such as museums. There are many kinds of problems to be solved because of the limitation of Web and the dynamically changing environment. We present a methodology for intelligent mobile robot that demonstrates a certain degree of autonomy in navigation applications. In this paper, we focus on a mobile robot navigator equipped with neuro-fuzzy controller which perceives the environment, make decisions, and take actions. The neuro-fuzzy controller equipped with collision avoidance behavior and target trace behavior enables the mobile robot to navigate in dynamic environment from the start location to goal location. Most telerobotics system workable on the Web have used standard Internet techniques such as HTTP, CGI and Scripting languages. However, for mobile robot navigations, these tools have significant limitations. In our study, C# and ASP.NET are used for both the client and the server side programs because of their interactivity and quick responsibility. Two kinds of simulations are performed to verify our proposed method. Our approach is verified through computer simulations of collision avoidance and target trace.

Multi-floor navigation of a mobile robot requires a technology that allows the robot to safely get on and off the elevator. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method of recognizing the elevator from the current position of the robot and estimating the location of the elevator locally so that the robot can safely get on the elevator regardless of the accumulated position error during autonomous navigation. The proposed method uses a deep learning-based image classifier to identify the elevator from the image information obtained from the RGB-D sensor and extract the boundary points between the elevator and the surrounding wall from the point cloud. This enables the robot to estimate the reliable position in real time and boarding direction for general elevators. Various experiments exhibit the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method.

Getting on and off an elevator is one of the most important parts for multi-floor navigation of a mobile robot. In this study, we proposed the method for the pose recognition of elevator doors, safe path planning, and motion estimation of a robot using RGB-D sensors in order to safely get on and off the elevator. The accurate pose of the elevator doors is recognized using a particle filter algorithm. After the elevator door is open, the robot builds an occupancy grid map including the internal environments of the elevator to generate a safe path. The safe path prevents collision with obstacles in the elevator. While the robot gets on and off the elevator, the robot uses the optical flow algorithm of the floor image to detect the state that the robot cannot move due to an elevator door sill. The experimental results in various experiments show that the proposed method enables the robot to get on and off the elevator safely.

Unlike normal wheels, the Mecanum wheel enables omni-directional movement regardless of the orientation of a mobile robot. In this paper, a robust trajectory tracking control method is developed based on the dynamic model of the Mecanum wheel mobile robot in order that the mobile robot can move along the given path in the environment with disturbance. The method is designed using the impedance control to make the mobile robot to track the path, and the integral sliding mode control for robustness to disturbance. The good performance of the proposed method is verified using the MATLAB /Simulink simulation and also through the experiment on an actual Mecanum wheel mobile robot. In both the simulation and the experimentation, we make the mobile robot move along a reference trajectory while maintaining the robot's orientation at a constant angle to see the characteristics of the Mecanum wheel.

The Expanded Guide Circle (EGC) method has been originally proposed as the guidance navigation method for improving the efficiency of the remote operation using the sensory information. The previous algorithm is, however, concerned only for the omni-directional mobile robot, so it needs to suggest a suitable one for a mobile robot with non-holonomic constraints. The ego-kinematic transform is a method to map points of R2 into the ego-kinematic space which implicitly represents non-holonomic constraints for admissible paths. Thus, robots with non-holonomic constraints in the ego-kinematic space can be considered as “free-flying object”. In this paper, we propose an effective obstacle avoidance method for mobile robots with non-holonomic constraints by applying EGC method in the ego-kinematic space using the ego-kinematic transformation. This proposed method shows that it works better for non-holonomic mobile robots such as differential-drive robot than the original one. The simulation results show its effectiveness of performance.

The localization of the robot is one of the most important factors of navigating mobile robots. The use of featured information of landmarks is one approach to estimate the location of the robot. This approach can be classified into two categories: the natural-landmark-based and artificial-landmark-based approach. Natural landmarks are suitable for any environment, but they may not be sufficient for localization in the less featured or dynamic environment. On the other hand, artificial landmarks may generate shaded areas due to space constraints. In order to improve these disadvantages, this paper presents a novel development of the localization system by using artificial and natural-landmarks-based approach on a topological map. The proposed localization system can recognize far or near landmarks without any distortion by using landmark tracking system based on top-view image transform. The camera is rotated by distance of landmark. The experiment shows a result of performing position recognition without shading section by applying the proposed system with a small number of artificial landmarks in the mobile robot.

Generating motion of center of mass for biped robots is a challenging issue since biped robots can easily lose balance due to limited contact area between foot and ground. In this paper, we propose force control method to generate high-speed motion of the center of mass for horizontal direction without losing balancing condition. Contact consistent multi-body dynamics of the robot is used to calculate force for horizontal direction of the center of mass considering balance. The calculated force is applied for acceleration or deceleration of the center of mass to generate high speed motion. The linear inverted pendulum model is used to estimate motion of the center of mass and the estimated motion is used to select either maximum or minimum force to stop at goal position. The proposed method is verified by experiments using 12-DOF torque controlled human sized legged robot.

Most of outdoor mobile robots have a suspension on each wheel in order to relieve the shock by ground obstacles and to improve the driving stability. Typically, in the actual operations, the suspensions have been used under a given set of conditions as all the damping and spring coefficients of the suspensions are fixed. However, it is necessary to readjust the coefficients of the suspensions according to surface conditions that may cause the unstable shaking of a robot body at high speed driving. Therefore, this paper is focused on the mobility analysis of an outdoor robot when the coefficients of suspensions (in particular, damping coefficients) are changed while driving on an uneven road surface. In this paper, a semi-active suspension with twelve damping coefficient levels was used and a small sized vehicle with the suspensions was employed to analyze the mobility dependent on a change of the damping coefficient. And the mobility was evaluated through driving experiments on a bumped slope.

A rectangle-based relative localization method is proposed for a mobile robot based on a novel geometric formulation. In an artificial environment where a mobile robot navigates, rectangular shapes are ubiquitous. When a scene rectangle is captured using a camera attached to a mobile robot, localization can be performed and described in the relative coordinates of the scene rectangle. Especially, our method works with a single image for a scene rectangle whose aspect ratio is not known. Moreover, a camera calibration is unnecessary with an assumption of the pinhole camera model. The proposed method is largely based on the theory of coupled line cameras (CLC), which provides a basis for efficient computation with analytic solutions and intuitive geometric interpretation. We introduce the fundamentals of CLC and describe the proposed method with some experimental results in simulation environment.

Conventional path tracking methods designed for two-wheeled differential drive robots are not suitable for omni-directional robots. In this study, we present a controller which can accomplish more accurate path tracking and orientation correction by exploiting the unconstrained movement capability of omni-directional robots. The proposed controller is proven to be stable using a Lyapunov stability criterion. Various experiments in real environments show that performance of path tracking and orientation correction has improved in the proposed controller.

In this paper, a new mobile robot, so called a rollerbot, is presented, which has single body and rugby-ball shaped roller wheel. A rollerbot has single point contact on ground and low energy consumption in motion because of the reduced friction. By changing center of mass using a balancing weight, a rollerbot is able to get steering force. The vertical position of mass center of the rollerbot in this paper is designed to lie inside radius of the roller wheel, so that to have stable equilibrium position. Thus, the posture and the steering control of the rollerbot can be easily done by changing the center of mass. Kinematics of the rollerbot is derived by transformation of differential motion in this paper.

Odometry using wheel encoder is a common relative positioning technique for wheeled mobile robots. The major drawback of odometry is that the kinematic modeling errors are accumulated when the travel distance increases. Therefore, accurate calibration of odometry is required. In several related works, various schemes for odometry calibration are proposed. However, design guidelines of test tracks for odometry calibration were not considered. More accurate odometry calibration results can be achieved by using appropriate test track because the position and orientation errors after the test are affected by the test track. In this paper, we propose the design guidelines of test tracks for odometry calibration schemes using experimental heading errors. Numerical simulations and experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed design guidelines result in more accurate calibration results.

A local map-based exploration algorithm for mobile robots is presented. Segmented frontiers and their relative transformations constitute a tree structure. By the proposed efficient frontier segmentation and a local map management method, a robot can reduce the unknown area and update the local grid map which is assigned to each frontier node. Although this local map-based exploration method uses only local maps and their adjacent node information, mapping completion and efficiency can be greatly improved by merging and updating the frontier nodes. Also, we suggest appropriate graph search exploration methods for corridor and hall environments. The simulation demonstrates that the entire environment can be represented by well-distributed frontier nodes.

In this paper, we propose a cable climbing robot which can climb up and down the cables in the bridges. The robot mechanism consists of three parts: a wheel based driving mechanism, adhesion mechanism, and safe landing mechanism. The wheel based driving mechanism is driven by tooth clutches and motors. The adhesion mechanism plays the role of maintaining adhesion force by a combination of pantograph, ball screw, and springs even when the power is lost. The safe landing mechanism is developed for guaranteeing the safety of the robot during operations on cables. It can make the robot fall down with reduced speed by dissipating the gravitational forces. The robot mechanism is designed and manufactured for validating its effectiveness.

This paper introduces several mobile robots developed by using LEGO MIDSTORM for experimental studies of robotics engineering education. The first mobile robot is the line tracer robot that tracks a line, which is a prototype of wheel-driven mobile robots. Ultra violet sensors are used to detect and follow the line. The second robot system is a two-wheel balancing robot that is somewhat nonlinear and complex. For the robot to balance, a gyro sensor is used to detect a balancing angle and PD control is used. The last robot system is a combined system of a line tracer and a two-wheel balancing robot. Sensor filtering and control algorithms are tested through experimental studies.

This paper proposes how to improve the performance of CSS-based indoor localization system. CSS based localization utilizes signal flight time between anchors and tag to estimate distance. From the distances, the 3-dimensional position is calculated through trilateration. However the error in distance caused from multi-path effect transfers to the position error especially in indoor environment. This paper handles a problem of reducing error in raw distance information. And, we propose the new localization method by pattern matching instead of the conventional localization method based on trilateration that is affected heavily on multi-path error. The pattern matching method estimates the position by using the fact that the measured data of near positions possesses a high similarity. In order to gain better performance of localization, we use EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) to fuse the result of CSS based localization and robot model.