The role of QR Code robots in smart logistics is great. Cognitive robots, such as logistics robots, were mostly used to adjust routes and search for peripheral sensors, cameras, and recognition signs attached to walls. However, recently, the ease of making QR Codes and the convenience of producing and attaching a lot of information within QR Codes have been raised, and many of these reasons have made QR Codes recognizable as visions and others. In addition, there have been cases in developed countries and Korea that control several of these robots at the same time and operate logistics factories smartly. This representative case is the KIVA robot in Amazon. KIVA robots are only operated inside Amazon, but information about them is not exposed to the outside world, so a variety of similar robots are developed and operated in several places around the world. They are applied in various fields such as education, medical, silver, military, parking, construction, marine, and agriculture, creating a variety of application robots. In this work, we are developing a robot that can recognize its current position, move and control in the directed direction through two-dimensional QR Codes with the same horizontal and vertical sides, and the error is to create a QR Code robot with accuracy to reach within 3mm. This paper focuses a study on the speculative navigation using auxiliary encoder during the development of QR Code-aware indoor mobility robots.

In this paper, we propose a modified ORB-SLAM (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) for precise indoor navigation of a mobile robot. The exact posture and position estimation by the ORB-SLAM is not possible all the times for the indoor navigation of a mobile robot when there are not enough features in the environment. To overcome this shortcoming, additional IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and encoder sensors were installed and utilized to calibrate the ORB-SLAM. By fusing the global information acquired by the SLAM and the dynamic local location information of the IMU and the encoder sensors, the mobile robot can be obtained the precise navigation information in the indoor environment with few feature points. The superiority of the modified ORB-SLAM was verified to compared with the conventional algorithm by the real experiments of a mobile robot navigation in a corridor environment.

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.

A gradient method can provide a global optimal path in indoor environments. However, the optimal path can be often generated in narrow areas despite a sufficient wide area which lead to safe navigation. This paper presents a novel approach to path planning for safe navigation of a mobile robot. The proposed algorithm extracts empty regions using a ray-casting method and then generates temporary waypoints in wider regions in order to reach the goal fast and safely. The experimental results show that the proposed method can generate paths in the wide regions in most cases and the robot can reach the goal safely at high speeds.

Various robot platforms have been designed and developed to perform given tasks in a hazardous environment for the purpose of surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue, and etc. We have considered a terrain adaptive hybrid robot platform which is equipped with rapid navigation on flat floors and good performance on overcoming stairs or obstacles. Since our special consideration is posed to its flexibility for real application, we devised a design of a transformable robot structure which consists of an ordinary wheeled structure to navigate fast on flat floor and a variable tracked structure to climb stairs effectively. Especially, track arms installed in front side, rear side, and mid side are used for navigation mode transition between flatland navigation and stairs climbing. The mode transition is determined and implemented by adaptive driving mode control of mobile robot. The wheel and track hybrid mobile platform apparatus applied off-road driving mechanism for various professional service robots is verified through experiments for navigation performance in real and test-bed environment.

For indoor mobile robots, the performance of autonomous navigation is affected by a variety of factors. In this paper, we focus on the characteristics of indoor absolute positioning systems. Two commercially available sensor systems are experimentally tested under various conditions. Mobile robot navigation experiments were carried out, and the results show that resultant performance of navigation is highly dependent upon the characteristics of positioning systems. The limitations and characteristics of positioning systems are analyzed from both quantitative and qualitative point of view. On the basis of the analysis, the relationship between the positioning system characteristics and the controller design are presented.

In this paper, we propose remote navigation control for intelligent robot using particle swarm optimization(PSO). The proposed system consists of interfaces for intelligent robot navigation and user interface in order to control the intelligent robot remotely. And communication interfaces using TCP/IP socket is used. To do this, we first design the fuzzy navigation controller based on expert's knowledge for intelligent robot navigation. At this time, we use the PSO algorithm in order to identify the membership functions of fuzzy control rules. And then, we propose the remote system in order to navigate the robot remotely. Finally, we show the effectiveness and feasibility of the developed controller and remote system through some experiments.

This paper describes a new method for indoor environment mapping and localization with stereo camera. For environmental modeling, we directly use the depth and color information in image pixels as visual features. Furthermore, only the depth and color information at horizontal centerline in image is used, where optical axis passes through. The usefulness of this method is that we can easily build a measure between modeling and sensing data only on the horizontal centerline. That is because vertical working volume between model and sensing data can be changed according to robot motion. Therefore, we can build a map about indoor environment as compact and efficient representation. Also, based on such nodes and sensing data, we suggest a method for estimating mobile robot positioning with random sampling stochastic algorithm. With basic real experiments, we show that the proposed method can be an effective visual navigation algorithm.

We propose a navigation algorithm using image-based visual servoing utilizing a fixed camera. We define the mobile robot navigation problem as an unconstrained optimization problem to minimize the image error between the goal position and the position of a mobile robot. The residual function which is the image error between the position of a mobile robot and the goal position is generally large for this navigation problem. So, this navigation problem can be considered as the nonlinear least squares problem for the large residual case. For large residual, we propose a method to find the second-order term using the secant approximation method. The performance was evaluated using the simulation.