Recent technical trend on telerobotics, teleoperations and telepresence for Mars rover as well as Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer etc. for Mars rock analysis by Rover are introduced and investigated. Scientific informations on telerobotics, teleoperations and telepresence are analysed. Researches on telepresence and telerobotics are promoted together with research on teleoperations. Derivative effect and innovation opportunity are created through space exploration technology and sustaining development of national technology are maintained.

Regarding bridge structure maintenance and inspection, this study was conducted to replace the current system, in which bridge diagnostics specialists ride on inspection vehicles to perform visual inspections, with a robotic system equipped with a small camera. The new system would greatly reduce the effort required, enhance the safety of inspectors and provide more accurate and efficient data that are objective and quantitative. For this purpose, a new robotic inspection system was developed for field test which was performed on Ahyun overpass bridge. Field test results are described to prove the on-site applicability.

The increase of traffic over a bridge has been emerged as one of the most severe problems in view of bridge maintenance, since the load effect caused by the vehicle passage over the bridge has brought out a long-term damage to bridge structure, and it is nearly impossible to maintain operational serviceability of bridge to user's satisfactory level without any concern on bridge maintenance at the phase of completion. This study has the aim of development on automated inspection system to lower surface of bridge superstructures to replace the conventional system of bridge inspection with the naked eye, where the monitoring staff is directly on board to refractive or other type of maintenance vehicles, with which it is expected that we can solve the problems essentially where the results of inspection are varied to change with subjective manner from monitoring staff, increase stabilities in safety during the inspection, and make contribution to construct data base by providing objective and quantitative data and materials through image processing method over data captured by cameras. By this system it is also expected that objective estimation over the right time of maintenance and reinforcement work will lead enormous decrease in maintenance cost.

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 introduce an internal pipeline exploration of an in-pipe robot, based on the landmark recognition system. The fittings of pipelines such as elbows and branches are used as the landmarks. The robot recognizes the landmarks with a vision system by using the shadows of the elements, which are generated by the specially designed illuminator on the robot. By using a simple image-processing, the robot can easily detect and distinguish these landmarks while recognizing the direction of the pipeline path. Simultaneously, all information for exploration is continuously recorded and used to reconstruct the map of the pipelines. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by real experiments using the in-pipe robot MRINSPECT V for moving inside of the miniature urban 8-inch gas pipeline structure.

The Mobile robots are increasingly being used to perform tasks in unknown environments. The potential of robots to undertake such tasks lies in their ability to intelligently and efficiently search in an environment. An algorithm has been developed for robots which explore the environment to measure the physical properties (dust in this paper). While the robot is moving, it measures the amount of dust and registers the value in the corresponding grid cell. The robot moves from local maximum to local minimum, then to another local maximum, and repeats. To reach the local maximum or minimum, simple gradient following is used. Robust estimation of the gradient using perturbation/correlation, which is very effective when analytical solution is not available, is described. By introducing the probability of each grid cell, and considering the probability distribution, the robot doesn’t have to visit all the grid cells in the environment still providing fast and efficient sensing. The extended algorithm to coordinate multiple robots is presented with simulation results.