Seunghwan Park

To improve the performance and efficiency of the tele-operation of robots, we suggest a method that links the information of objects and space. To do this, classifications for objects and space are carried out separately, and the relationship between them is analyzed to give adequate importance to objects and space. Categorization methods are suggested and will be implemented for this purpose.

To improve the ability of providing service of a service robot, ETRO, we did a survey targeting 85 spectators of the National Science Museum. ETRO offered the conversation service with its actions of two arms and mobile part. As a result, most visitors said that they felt familiar feeling to ETRO. Especially, the user customized service through talking and face changing was very popular. With this result, we know it is important that a service robot should offer a customized service fitted to users to get good responses.

A user-oriented service robot, ETRO, is implemented. To satisfy users, it has various parts which can give humanlike services to the spectators. These parts consist of two kinds which are permanent parts and changeable parts. Also it has employed the tele-presence system to show the reactions expected by visitors and to control the robot precisely.

This paper presents an efficient method for building a topological map for robots in urban environments based on a geographic information system (GIS) such as satellite maps. In urban space, mobile robots need a special map, such as a topological map, to generate a path toward their goal. Unlike a car map, a topological map for mobile robot navigation should include semantic data, e.g., the width and type of road. This paper divides the GIS-based topological map building process into two steps. The first step is defining the topological map model to fit the mobile robot navigation in an urban environment. The second step is generating a topological map from existing GIS data to reduce the cost and improve the accuracy in building the map.

Multi-robot cooperation promises increased performance and fault-tolerance in large-scale environments. To achieve the goal with these features, dynamic task allocation algorithm is required to adapt changing environment. Whereas previous researches mostly have been done for simplifying the mission and emphasizing the task allocation algorithm, this paper addresses the needs to analyze the mission more concretely and introduces a strategy for the task allocation problem: off-line and on-line analyses. The off-line analysis takes the robot-working scenario into account statically before deploying the robots. The on-line analysis considers the real time task allocation algorithm while running the robots. Combining these two analyses, efficient task allocation is achieved with minimum cost.

Robot collision characteristics are analyzed by using the idea of the collision map. This analysis consists of the translations of the collision region on the collision map and they correspond to parallel movements of the original robot path. These translations are investigated in several cases and applied to general situations in which two robots are moving or working in a common workspace. Also, the collision characteristics are analyzed for a few special situations where the analysis of collision characteristics is crucial and the resultant solution for collision avoidance can be obtained.

This work presents a new practical environment modeling for mobile robots in an unknown circumstance. To perform environment modeling, obstacles located in the circumstance should be detected using sensor data. Then some sensor fusion methods are used to model environment better. Environment modeling shown In this work is based on the heuristic sensor fusion method. In this method, we define a segment as one ultrasonic sensor and two adjacent infrared sensors. Especially, infrared sensors are used to reduce defects of ultrasonic sensor such as poor directionality and frequent misreading. Whether infrared sensors of a segment detect obstacles or not, ultrasonic sensor data are modified. To evaluate the usefulness of the sensor fusion method, we used semicircular sensor module composed of 6 ultrasonic sensors and 7 infrared sensors. With this module, several experiments in indoor environment are performed.