• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.407-422
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• 2014

Objective: The purpose of the study is to develop quantitative usability evaluation criteria for senior-friendly autonomous transportation robot. Background: The Republic of Korea has become the most rapidly aging society, and is anticipated to enter the post-aged society in 2026. To raise the quality of life of a senior with limited mobility and to reduce the burden of caregivers, many high-tech assistive products with information technologies are developed nowadays. The senior-friendly autonomous transportation robot is one person robot vehicle to move a senior to the destination for hospitals, nursing homes or silver town complex. With built-in navigation system and environmental monitoring censors, it automatically seeks the path to the destination and avoids collision to obstacles and pedestrians on the way. Due to the early stage of the product, few usability studies in this field have been done, mostly on general service robots to assist seniors, power wheelchairs and delivery robots. ISO and KS standards for the service robots are focused on safety. Method: Based on the reference usability index, the early draft of the usability evaluation questionnaires was developed. After small group tests and interviews, the experts modified the initial draft to the Usability Evaluation Criteria for Senior-Friendly Autonomous Transportation Robot (UEC-SFATR). Result: UEC-SFATR consisted of 4 subscales - Safety, Controllability, Efficiency and Satisfaction. All of the 4 subscales of UEC-SFATR were passed the reliability criteria by 4 groups of seniors, divided by gender and familiarity of smart-devices. Conclusion: UEC-SFATR covers wider area of user experiences of the SFATR and is a good measurement tool to help both the users and developers of the robot. Application: This study provides guide to the future product development and product competitiveness evaluation by quantifying user experiences for the SFATR.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.202-207
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• 2013

In the paper, we design a autonomous mobile robot for freight transportation and propose an operation method of the robot in the warehouse. In order to implement autonomous navigation, it is needed to recognize the position of the robot and track the path to the target. Previous methods are hard to change the workspace environment and need high cost to install and keep a maintenance of the system. The lifter of freight transportation robot is designed to load and unload a baggage through up and down motion. Also, ultrasonic sensor, RFID, QR-code and camera sensor is used to carry out various functions while the robot navigates in the various environment. We design an operation method of the mobile robot in order to effectively arrive a goal position and transport a freight. The proposed methods are verified through various experiments.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.329-337
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• 2023

For safe last-mile autonomous robot delivery services in complex environments, rapid and accurate collision prediction and detection is vital. This study proposes a suitable neural network model that relies on multiple navigation sensors. A light detection and ranging technique is used to measure the relative distances to potential collision obstacles along the robot's path of motion, and an accelerometer is used to detect impacts. The proposed method tightly couples relative distance and acceleration time-series data in a complementary fashion to minimize errors. A long short-term memory, fully connected layer, and SoftMax function are integrated to train and classify the rapidly changing collision countermeasure state during robot motion. Simulation results show that the proposed method effectively performs collision prediction and detection for various obstacles.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.3373-3389
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• 2022

Exploration of mobile robot without prior data about environments is a fundamental problem during the SLAM processes. In this work, we propose improved version of previous Rmap algorithm by modifying its Exploration submodule. Despite the previous Rmap's performance which significantly reduces the overhead of the grid map, its exploration module costs a lot because of its rectangle following algorithm. To prevent that, we propose a new Rmap+ algorithm for autonomous path planning of mobile robot to explore an unknown environment. The algorithm bases on paired frontiers. To navigate and extend an exploration area of mobile robot, the Rmap+ utilizes the inner and outer frontiers. In each exploration round, the mobile robot using the sensor range determines the frontiers. Then robot periodically changes the range of sensor and generates inner pairs of frontiers. After calculating the length of each frontiers' and its corresponding pairs, the Rmap+ selects the goal point to navigate the robot. The experimental results represent efficiency and applicability on exploration time and distance, i.e., to complete the whole exploration, the path distance decreased from 15% to 69%, as well as the robot decreased the time consumption from 12% to 86% than previous algorithms.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.379-388
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• 2018

In this study, we propose a new approach to impliment autonomous travelling of mobile robot based on obstacle avoidance and voice command. Obstacle Avoidance technology of mobile robpot. It has been used in wide range of different robotics areas to minimize the risk of collisions. Obstacle avoidance of mobile robots are mostly applied in transportation systems such as aircraft traffic control, autonomous cars etc. Collision avoidance is a important requirement in mobile robot systems where they all featured some kind of obstacle detection techniques in order to avoid colliding. In this paper it was illustrated the reliability of voice command and obstacle avoidance for autonomous travelling of mobile robot with two wheels as the purpose of application to the manufacturing process by simulation and experiments.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.565-570
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• 2021

Agriculture in South Korea is losing productivity due to the lack of manpower as aging population increases. To overcome this, the agricultural robot market is growing rapidly, and research is being conducted on remote control and autonomous driving of agricultural robots. This work designs the appearance and structure of agricultural robots and implements the devices and control systems for driving. By utilizing and optimizing LiDAR sensors, we applied object recognition technology, which is an essential function for autonomous driving. This can reduce labor costs and improve productivity of transportation tasks that require the most labor in agriculture.

• Journal of Drive and Control
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.46-52
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• 2024

The advancement of autonomous driving technology has heightened the importance of Autonomous Mobile Robotics (AMR) within smart factories. Notably, in tasks involving the transportation of heavy objects, the consideration of weight in route optimization and path planning has become crucial. There is ongoing research on local path planning, such as Dijkstra, A^*, and RRT^*, focusing on minimizing travel time and distance within smart factory warehouses. Additionally, there are ongoing simultaneous studies on route optimization, including TSP algorithms for various path explorations and on minimizing energy consumption in mobile robotics operations. However, previous studies have often overlooked the weight of the objects being transported, emphasizing only minimal travel time or distance. Therefore, this research proposes route planning that accounts for the maximum payload capacity of mobile robotics and offers load-optimized path planning for multi-destination transportation. Considering the load, a genetic algorithm with the objectives of minimizing both travel time and distance, as well as energy consumption is employed. This approach is expected to enhance the efficiency of mobility within smart factories.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2022.11a
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• pp.809-811
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• 2022

최근 온라인 유통의 약진 속에서 대표적인 오프라인 유통인 백화점 채널이 예전에 비해 경쟁력이 약화 되었다는 평가를 받고 있다. 이는 유통채널로서의 경쟁력이 약화 된 것이지, 복합 문화 센터의 경쟁력은 나날이 느는 추세다. 길이 복잡한 백화점에서 비대면 방식으로 시설 안내 및 길 찾기 동행, 사용자 나이 및 성별에 따른 매장 추천, 고객 센터 연결 등을 고객에게 제공하는 가이드 로봇을 통하여 경쟁력을 키우고자 해당 서비스를 제안한다.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.1216-1221
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• 2022

Ships tend to be larger to increase the efficiency of cargo transportation. Larger ships lead to increased travel time for ship workers, increased work intensity, and reduced work efficiency. Problems such as increased work intensity are reducing the influx of young people into labor, along with the phenomenon of avoidance of high intensity labor by the younger generation. In addition, the rapid aging of the population and decrease in the young labor force aggravate the labor shortage problem in the maritime industry. To overcome this, the maritime industry has recently introduced technologies such as an intelligent production design platform and a smart production operation management system, and a smart autonomous logistics system in one of these technologies. The smart autonomous logistics system is a technology that delivers various goods using intelligent mobile robots, and enables the robot to drive itself by using sensors such as lidar and camera. Therefore, in this paper, it was checked whether the mobile robot could autonomously drive to the stop sign by detecting the passage way of the ship deck. The autonomous driving was performed by detecting the passage way of the ship deck through the camera mounted on the mobile robot based on the data learned through Nvidia's End-to-end learning. The mobile robot was stopped by checking the stop sign using SSD MobileNetV2. The experiment was repeated five times in which the mobile robot autonomously drives to the stop sign without deviation from the ship deck passage way at a distance of about 70m. As a result of the experiment, it was confirmed that the mobile robot was driven without deviation from passage way. If the smart autonomous logistics system to which this result is applied is used in the marine industry, it is thought that the stability, reduction of labor force, and work efficiency will be improved when workers work.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.362-370
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• 2021

In this paper, we propose the Autonomous Stair-climbing system based on data from ToF sensors and IMU in developing stair-climbing robots to passive wheelchair users. Autonomous stair-climbing system are controlled by separating the timing of landing gear operation by location and utilizing state machines. To prove the theory, we construct and experiment with standard model stairs. Through an experiment to get the Attack angle, the average error of operating landing gear was 2.19% and the average error of the Attack angle was 2.78%, and the step division and status transition of the autonomous stair-climbing system were verified. As a result, the performance of the proposed techniques will reduce constraints of transportation handicapped.