An increasing number of researches and developments for personal or professional service robots are attracting a lot of attention and interest industrially and academically during the past decade. Furthermore, the development of intelligent robots is intensively fostered as strategic industry. Until now, most of practical and commercial service robots are worked by remotely operated controller. The most important technical issue of remote control is a wireless communication, especially in the indoor and unstructured environments where communication infrastructures might be destroyed by various disasters. Therefore we propose a multi-robot following navigation method for securing the valid communication distance extension of the remote control based on WPAN(Wireless Personal Area Networks). The concept and implementation of following navigation are introduced and the performance verification is performed through real navigation experiments in real or test-bed environments.
This paper deals with researching and designing the fastening parts to be used in order to assemble various Teaching Aids Robots (or Hands-on Robots) with originally incompatible parts supplied by different manufacturers. The suggested fastening parts provide the compatibility among Teaching Aids Robots even though the educational robot customers use incompatible parts from different companies. The designed fastening parts are classified into four set groups such as frame set, sliding-bar set, connector set, and set of chuck and rivet/bolt. Each set of the fastening parts reflects the needs collected from the users, and then some portion of new idea has been added to implement the needs. In this paper, the examples of the Teaching Aids Robots which are assembled with both commercial parts and the designed parts are presented in order to evaluate the compatibility and usability of the suggested fastening parts. As a result, both compatibility and usability of the fastening parts suggested in this paper were proved. The designed fastening parts have been distributed to more than 100 elementary schools nationwide.
This paper presents a method, Exposure Controlled Temporal Filtering (ECF), applied to visual motion tracking, that can cancel the temporal aliasing of periodic vibrations of cameras and fluctuations in illumination through the control of exposure time. We first present a theoretical analysis of the exposure induced image time integration process and how it samples sensor impingent light that is periodically fluctuating. Based on this analysis we develop a simple method to cancel high frequency vibrations that are temporally aliased onto sampled image sequences and thus to subsequent motion tracking measurements. Simulations and experiments using the ‘Center of Gravity’ and Normalized Cross-Correlation motion tracking methods were performed on a microscopic motion tracking system to validate the analytical predictions
Control and trajectory generation of a 7 DOF anthropomorphic robot arm suffer from computational complexity and singularity problem because of numerical inverse kinematics. To deal with such problems, analytical methods for a redundant robot arm have been researched to enhance the performance of inverse kinematics. In this research, we propose an analytical inverse kinematics algorithm for a 7 DOF anthropomorphic robot arm. Using this algorithm, it is possible to generate a trajectory passing through the singular points and intuitively move the elbow without regard to the end-effector pose. Performance of the proposed algorithm was verified by various simulations. It is shown that the trajectory planning using this algorithm provides correct results near the singular points and can utilize redundancy intuitively.
This paper presents a frequency-response test performed on an antagonistic actuation system consisting of two Mckibben pneumatic artificial muscles and a pneumatic circuit. A linear model, capable of estimating the dynamic characteristics of the antagonistic system in the operating range of pneumatic artificial muscles, was optimally calculated based on frequency-response results and applied to a multiple simultaneous specification control scheme. Trajectory tracking results showed that the presented multiple simultaneous specification controller, built experimentally by three PD typed sample controllers, satisfied successfully all required control specifications; rising time, maximum overshoot, steady-state error.
It is very important for a mobile robot to recognize and model its environments for navigation. However, the grid map constructed by sonar sensors cannot accurately represent the environment, especially the narrow environment, due to the angular uncertainty of sonar data. Therefore, we propose a map building scheme which combines sonar sensors and IR sensors. The maps built by sonar sensors and IR sensors are combined with different weights which are determined by the degree of translational and rotational motion of a robot. To increase the effectiveness of sensor fusion, we also propose optimal sensor arrangement through various experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method can represent the environment such as narrow corridor and open door more accurately than conventional sonar sensor-based map building methods.
In many industries, the accurate and quick checking of goods in storage is of great importance. Most today's inventory checking is based on bar code scanning, but the relative position between a bar code and an optical scanner should be maintained in close distance and proper angle for the successful scanning. This requirement makes it difficult to fully automate the inventory information/control systems. The use of RFID technology can be a solution for overcoming this problem. The mobile robot presented in this paper is equipped with an RFID tag scanning system, that automates the otherwise manual or semi-automatic inventory checking process. We designed the robot system in a quite practical approach, and the developed system is close to the commercialization stage. In our experiments, the robot could collect information of goods stacked on shelves autonomously without any failure and maintain corresponding database while it navigated predefined paths between the shelves using vision.
This paper proposes a technique of indoor localization for mobile robot by so called indoor GPS and EKF. Basically the concept of indoor GPS is similar outdoor GPS, and the indoor GPS gets distances between Anchors and Tag by a ranging method of CSS and then estimates the coordinate by distances and known Anchor positions. After we performed performance test of indoor GPS system in ideal and multipath environment, we configured that the indoor GPS has internal error factors and external error factors. This paper handled a multipath problem belonging to external error factors. At first various direct physical method are introduced to fix the multipath problems, and as expected we got errors corrected considerably. And then the method of selective anchors for indoor GPS is applied. With these two level improvement of indoor GPS performance, EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) is applied to mobile robot in indoor environment. The usefulness of the proposed methods are shown by a series of experiments in a environment giving contaminated data by multipath.
In a large scale robot system, one of important problems is software integration, which involves three elements: modularity, reusability and stability. By these issues, the degree of convenience of system integration, its required time and the performance of the system stability can be determined. In addition, the convenience of system management can be determined by the degree of completion of service components. This paper explains the template based service component (TBSC) for the integration of service components in networked robot. The important characteristics of TBSC are automatical execution and recovery process by a PnP supporting robot framework, which helps a system operator to manage a robot system comfortably. For easy implementation and system stability, we provide a service component creator and a verification tool to developers.
This article investigates kinematic characteristics of a Schönflies motion generator which represents a mechanism having translational three Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) and rotational one-DOF motion about a fixed axis. The mechanism consists of the base plate and the moving plate, and four identical limbs connecting them. Each limb employs two revolute joints (RR), one parallelogram (Pa), and two revolute joints (RR) from the base plate to the moving plate. The mechanism is driven by four actuators which are placed on the base plate to minimize dynamic loads. It is shown through simulations that the mechanism can be designed to secure large dexterous workspace and thus has very high potential for actual applications such as haptic devices and high-speed requiring tasks such as pick-and-place operations, riveting, screwing tasks, etc.
The human-following is one of the significant procedure in human-friendly navigation of mobile robots. There are many approaches of human-following technology. Many approaches have adopted various multiple sensors such as vision system and Laser Range Finder (LRF). In this paper, we propose detection and tracking approaches for human legs by the use of a single LRF. We extract four simple attributes of human legs. To define the boundary of extracted attributes mathematically, we used a Support Vector Data Description (SVDD) scheme. We establish an efficient leg-tracking scheme by exploiting a human walking model to achieve robust tracking under occlusions. The proposed approaches were successfully verified through various experiments.