The modernization process of Korea, which can be considered westernization, has influenced Korean folk culture. In this process the kimchi culture could be destroyed. However the kimchi culture has survived very well to date. This study was conducted to investigate the cause of this survival of the kimchi culture. To accomplish this, the enormous influence of modernization on kimchi culture and the cause of its successful survival was investigated in the middle region of the Korean peninsula. We think that the kimchi culture can survive because of the inherent system and structure. Kimchi is composed of vegetables, salt, seasoning, and salted seafood (jeotgal), which are systemized. We also described the kimchi ethnography in this region to study the regional characteristics. The eastern coast uses a different method to salt the cabbage during the production of Kimchi, namely it uses seawater to accomplish this. Additionally, pollak broth is used instead of jeotgal. However nowadays the regional uniqueness of kimchi culture has greatly disappeared in large part, and Korean kimchi is standardized in this region.

This paper presents a localization system using ceiling images in a large indoor environment. For a system with low cost and complexity, we propose a single camera based system that utilizes ceiling images acquired from a camera installed to point upwards. For reliable operation, we propose a method using hybrid features which include natural landmarks in a natural scene and artificial landmarks observable in an infrared ray domain. Compared with previous works utilizing only infrared based features, our method reduces the required number of artificial features as we exploit both natural and artificial features. In addition, compared with previous works using only natural scene, our method has an advantage in the convergence speed and robustness as an observation of an artificial feature provides a crucial clue for robot pose estimation. In an experiment with challenging situations in a real environment, our method was performed impressively in terms of the robustness and accuracy. To our knowledge, our method is the first ceiling vision based localization method using features from both visible and infrared rays domains. Our system can be easily utilized with a variety of service robot applications in a large indoor environment.

This paper describes an efficient path generation method for area coverage. Its applications include robots for de-mining, cleaning, painting, and so on. Our method is basically based on a divide and conquer strategy. We developed a novel cell decomposition algorithm that divides a given area into several cells. Each cell is covered by a robot motion that requires minimum time to cover the cell. Using this method, completeness and time efficiency of coverage are easily achieved. For the completeness of coverage in dynamic environments, we also propose a path following method that makes the robot cover missed areas as a result of the presence of unknown obstacles. The effectiveness of the method is verified using computer simulations.