In an upcoming ubiquitous era, humankind will live in a ubiquitous space, where everything is connected through communication network. In this ubiquitous space, a ubiquitous robot, which can be used by anyone for any service through any device and any network at anytime and anywhere in a u-space, is expected to be required to serve seamless and context-aware services to humankind. In this paper, we introduce the ubiquitous robot, and define three components of the ubiquitous robot. The first one is "SoBot" which can be connected through the network in anywhere with environment recognition function and communication ability with human. The second one is "EmBot" which is embedded into environments and mobile robots and has localization and certification function with sensor fusion. The last one is "Mobile Robot" which serves overall physical services. This paper also introduces KAIST ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Center that pursues the implementation of the ubiquitous robot.
A number of Humanoids are introduced including ASIMO, HRP-2 Promet, Johnniee, Babybot, and KHR-2. Most researches are focused on the development of stable biped walking of Humanoids and it is not easy to endow an Humanoid with intelligence and service technology until now in the sense that the operation time of a Humanoid is limited less than 30 minutes even in the case that the battery is used only for the control of actuators in a Humanoid. In this paper, a brief survey on Humanoids is proposed and the concept of 'Network-based Humanoid', a Humanoid being able to provide intelligence for human-friendly services using ubiquitous networks, is introduced briefly.
As a result of high integration of semiconductor device, the global planarization of multi-layer structures is necessary. So the chemical mechanical polishing(CMP) is widely applied to manufacturing the dielectric layer and metal line in the semiconductor device. CMP process is under influence of polisher, pad, slurry, and process itself, etc. In comparison with the general CMP which uses the slurry including abrasives, fixed abrasive pad takes advantage of planarity, resulting from decreasing pattern selectivity and defects such as dishing & erosion due to the reduction of abrasive concentration especially. This paper introduces the manufacturing technique of fixed abrasive pad using hydrophilic polymers with swelling characteristic in water and explains the self-conditioning phenomenon. And the tungsten CMP using fixed abrasive pad achieved the good conclusion in terms of the removal rate, non-uniformity, surface roughness, material selectivity, micro-scratch free contemporary with the pad life-time.
Recently, the lead-time of a product is to be shortened in order to satisfy consumer's demand. It is thus important to reduce the manufacturing time and the cost of 3D-shaped microstructures. Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and devices are usually fabricated by lithography-based methods. Above method is not flexible for the rapid manufacture of 3D-shaped microstructures because it depends on work's experiences and requires excessive cost and time for making many masks. In this paper, the effective laser micromachining is developed to fabricate UV sensitive polymer microstructures using laser ablation. The proposed process, named by laser microRP, is a very useful method on rapid manufacturing for 3D-shaped microstructures.
Grinding is a finishing operation of products in various areas. Surface roughness of industrial components obtained in grinding operation is a critical quality measure but is a function of many operating parameters and their interactions. To achieve higher surface roughness and to identify the influence of grinding parameters on surface roughness, it is an ideal situation for using the design of experiments. This paper presents an successful optimization of grinding conditions and prediction of surface roughness using the design of experiments. From the experimental verfication tests, it was observed that this approach was useful as a robust design methodology for grinding operation.
The Magnetorheological fluid has the properties that its viscosity has drastic changed under some magnetic fields therefore, Magnetorheological fluids has been used for micro polishing of the micro part( for example, a aspherical surface in a micro lens). The polishing process may appears as follows. A part rotating on the spindle is brought into contact with an Magnetorheological finishing(MRF) fluids which is set in motion by the moving wall. In the region where the part and the MRF fluid are brought into contact, the applied magnetic field creates the conditions necessary for the material removal from the part surface. The material removal takes place in a certain region contacting the surface of the part which can be called the polishing spot or zone. The polishing mechanism of the material removal in the contact zone is considered as a process governed by the particularities of the Bingham flow in the contact zone. Resonable calculated and experimental magnitudes of the material removal rate for glass polishing lends support the validity of the approach.
Condenser tube which is used for a cooling system of automobiles is mainly manufactured by conform extrusion. However, direct extrusion using porthole die in comparison with conform extrusion has many advantages such as improvement of productivity, reduction of production cost etc. In general, the porthole die extrusion process is useful for manufacturing long tubes with hollow sections and consists of three stages(dividing, welding and forming stages). Especially, Porthole die for producing condenser tube is very complex. Thus, in order to obtain the detailed mechanics, to assist in the design of proper die shapes and sizes, and to improve the quality of products, porthole die extrusion should be analyzed in as non-steady state as possible. This paper describes FE analysis of non-steady state porthole die extrusion for producing condenser tube with multi-hole through 3D simulation in the non-steady state during the entire process to evaluate detailed metal flow, temperature distribution, welding pressure and extrusion load. Also to validate FE simulation of porthole die extrusion, a comparison of simulation and experiment results was presented in this paper.
This paper presents an experimental study on the dimensional error in ball-end milling. In the 3D free-formed surface machining using ball-end milling, while machining conditions are varied due to the Z component of the feed and existing hemisphere part of the ball-end mill, the mechanics of ball-end milling are complicated. In the finishing, most of cutting is performed the ball part of the cutter and the machined surface are required the high quality. But the dimensional errors in the ball-end milling are inevitably caused by tool deflection, tool wear, thermal effect and machine tool errors and so on. Among these factors, the most significant one of dimensional error is usually known as tool deflection. Tool deflection is related to the instantaneous horizontal cutting force and varied the finishing cutting path. It lead to decrease cutting area, thus resulting cutting forces but the dimensional precision surface could not be obtained. So the machining experiments are conducted for dimensional error investigation and these results may be used for decrease dimensional errors in practice.
The shearing process for the sheet metal is normally used in the precision elements such as a lead frame of IC chips. In these precision elements, the burr formation brings a bad effect on the system assembly and demands the additional deburring process. In this paper, we developed the small size precision punching system to investigate burr formation mechanism and to present kinematically punch-die aligning methodology between the rectangular shaped punch and die. The punch is driven by an air cylinder and the sheet metal is moving on the X-Y table system which is driven by two stepping motors. The whole system is controlled by microprocessor and is communicated with each other by RS232C serial communication protocol. Punching results are measured manually using the SEM photographs and are compared aligning result with miss aligning one.
The solutions of neighboring optimal control are typically obtained using the sweep method or transition matrices. Due to the numerical integration, however, the gain matrix can become infinite as time go to final one in the transition matrices, and the Riccati solution can become infinite when the final time free. To overcome these disadvantages, this paper proposes the pseudospectral Legendre method which is to first discreteize the linear boundary value problem using the global orthogonal polynomial, then transforms into an algebraic equations. Because this method is not necessary to take any integration of transition matrix or Riccati equation, it can be usefully used in real-time operation. Finally, its performance is verified by the numerical example for the space vehicle's orbit transfer.
The determination of camera position and orientation from known correspondences of 3D reference points and their images is known as pose estimation in computer vision or space resection in photogrammetry. This paper discusses estimation of transform parameters using the pattern matching method with 2D images only. In general, the 3D reference points or lines are needed to find out the 3D transform parameters, but this method is applied without the 3D reference points or lines. It uses only two images to find out the transform parameters between two image. The algorithm is simulated using Visual C++ on Windows 98.
A service robot is expected to be useful in indoor environment such as a hotel, a hospital and so on. However, many service robots are driven by wheels so that they cannot climb stairs to move to other floors. If the robot cannot use elevators. In this paper, the mobile manipulator system was developed, which can operate numeral buttons on the operating panel in the elevator. To perform this task, the robot is composed of an image recognition module, an ultrasonic sensor module and a manipulator. The robot can recognize numeral buttons and an end-effector in manipulator by the vision system. The Learning vector quantization (L VQ) algorithm is used to recognize the number on the button. The barcode mark on the end-effector is used to recognize the end-effector. The manipulator can push numeral buttons using informations captured by the vision system. The proposed method is evaluated by experiments.
Measurements of linear motion accuracy for one axis of NC lathe have achieved with laser interferometer system, but measurement of plane motion accuracy for two axes on zx-plane of NC lathe have not achieved with the above system. Therefore in this study, measuring unit system is organized using two optical linear scales in order to acquire error data during of plane motion of ATC(Automatic Tool Changer) of NC lathe by reading zx-plane coordinates. Two optical linear scales of measuring unit are fixed on zx-plane of NC lathe, and moving part of the scales are fixed to the ATC and then error motion data of z, x-coordinates of the ATC are received from the scales through the PC counter card inserted in computer at constant time intervals using tick pulses coming out from computer. And then, error motion data files acquired from measuring are saved in computer memory and the aspect of plane motion are modeled to plots, and range of the error data, means, average deviations, and standard deviations etc. are calculated by means of statistical treatments using computer programs.
This paper presents a two-time scale approach for vibration reduction of a high speed Cartesian manipulator. High speed manipulators would be subject to mechanical vibration due to high inertia forces acting on linkages. To achieve high throughput capability, such motion induced vibration would have to be damped quickly, to reduce settling time of the manipulator end-effector. This paper develops a two-time scale model for a structurally-flexible Cartesian manipulator. Based on the two-time scale model, a composite controller consisting of a computed torque method for the slow time-scale rigid body subsystem, and a linear quadratic state-feedback regulator for the fast time-scale flexible subsystem, is designed. Simulation results show that the proposed two time-scale controller yields good performance in attenuating structural vibration arising due to excitation from inertial forces.
This paper deals with the gait optimization of via points on biped robot. ZMP(Zero Moment Point) is the most important index in a biped robot's dynamic walking stability. To stable walking of a biped robot, leg's trajectory and a desired ZMP trajectory is required, balancing motion is solved by FDM(Finite Difference Method). In this paper, optimal index is defined to dynamically stable walking of a biped robot, and genetic algorithm is applied to optimize gait trajectory and balancing motion of a biped robot. By genetic algorithm, the index of walking parameter is efficiently optimized, and dynamic walking stability is verified by ZMP verification equation. Genetic algorithm is only applied to balancing motion, and is totally applied to whole trajectory. All of the suggested motions of biped robot are investigated by simulations and verified through the real implementation.