In this study, the analysis of the unsteady viscous flow field using the uRANS equation in a moving mesh was studied. The simulation domain is composed of an overset zone fixed to a propeller and rotating at a constant angular speed and a far zone which is located in the far distance and does not move. Each zone is composed of a polyhedral meshes for the accurate and robust gradient calculation in addition to the reduction of computation time. Simulation technique was applied to the aerodynamic analysis of the 5-inch propeller and compared with those of the MRF and the thrust test. The thrust predicted by the moving mesh showed good correlation with the MRF result within 0.5% difference, but the torque showed a tendency to under-prediction by about 10% compared to the MRF. In the future, we plan to further validate the numerical analysis technique using the moving mesh by applying it to the configurations in which precise test results exist.

Low-cost sensors have been widely used for mobile robot navigation in recent years. However, navigation performance based on low-cost sensors is not good enough to be practically used. Among many navigation techniques, building of an accurate map is a fundamental task for service robots, and mapping with low-cost IR sensors was investigated in this research. The robot’s orientation uncertainty was considered for mapping by modifying the Bayesian update formula. Then, the data association scheme was investigated to improve the quality of a built map when the robot’s pose uncertainty was large. Six low-cost IR sensors mounted on the robot could not give rich data enough to align the range data by the scan matching method, so a new sample-based method was proposed for data association. The real experiments indicated that the mapping method proposed in this research was able to generate a useful map for navigation.