Masanori Sugisaka

Development of a proportional control method for a mobile robot

Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control is a control strategy that has been successfully used over many years. Simplicity, robustness, a wide range of applicability and near-optimal performance are some of the reasons that have made PID control popular in the academic institutes and industries. This paper presents a new development of the proportional control method for stable tracking control system for a mobile robot. Proportional control parameters for each wheel are decided by confirmation of the minimal root mean square error (RMSE) of deviation in wheel rotations for each wheel. The accuracy performance was compared with the predictive nonlinear control method and the predictive proportional nonlinear control method. The experiment results demonstrated the feasibility and advantages of the proportional control on a trajectory tracking of a mobile robot.

Development of a personified face emotion recognition technique using fitness function

In this article, two subjects, one South East Asian (SEA) and the other Japanese, are considered for face emotion recognition using a genetic algorithm (GA). The parameters relating the face emotions in each case are entirely different. All six universally accepted emotions and one neutral are considered for each subject. Eyes and lips are usually considered as the features for recognizing emotions. This paper has two parts. The first part investigates a set of image processing methods suitable for recognizing face emotion. The acquired images have gone through a few preprocessing methods such as gray-scale, histogram equalization, and filtering. The edge detection has to be sufficiently successful even when the light intensity is uneven. So, to overcome this problem, the histogram-equalized image has been split into two regions of interest (ROI): the eye and lip regions. The two regions have been applied with the same preprocessing methods, but with different threshold values. It was found that the Sobel edge detection method performed very well in segmenting the image. Three feature extraction methods are considered, and their respective performances are compared. The method which is fastest in extracting eye features is adopted. The second part of the paper discusses the way to recognize emotions from eye features alone. Observation of various emotions of the two subjects lead to an unique eye characteristic, that is, the eye exhibits ellipses of different parameters in each emotion. The GA is adopted to optimize the ellipse characteristics of the eye features in each emotion based on an ellipse-based fitness function. This has shown successful emotion classifications, and a comparison is made on the emotions of each subject.

Finite Element modelling of Pneumatic Artificial Muscle

The intention of this article is to introduce and overview Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs) as whole and to discuss on its numerical modelling, namely using the Finite Element (FE) Method, to understand more on its behaviour in generating force for actuation. The construction of PAMS mainly consist of flexible, inflatable membranes, having orthotropic material behaviour. The main properties shaping the PAMs will be explained in terms of their load-carrying capacity and low weight in assembly. Discussion on their designs and capacity to function as locomotion device in robotics applications will be laid out, followed by FE modelling to represent PAMs overall structural behaviour under any potential operational conditions.

Proportional Control for Trajectory Tracking of A Wheeled Mobile Robot

The majority of the regulatory loops in the process industry use the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers. PID controllers are widely used and there are various types of processes that regulate the PID controllers, because of this most extensive research have focused on analyzing the closed-loop stability, performance and robustness. This paper presents a new development for proportional parameter estimation in mobile robot for stable tracking control system. Proportional control parameters are decided by determining the minimal root mean square error (RMSE) of deviation in wheel rotations for the right wheel and the left wheel in the real environment. The selected minimal RMSE are use in the developed proportional controller which consists of two different system that are individually control the two D.C motors to generate the PWS (power wheel steering) of the mobile robot. The two system works concurrently with different value of proportional control parameters to perform stable movement in trajectory straight line tracking.

Image segmentation by resonance algorithm

Computer vision and recognition plays more important role on intelligent control. In this paper, the image segmentation is done by the resonance theory. Resonance algorithm is an unsupervised method to generate the region (feature space) from similar pixels (feature vectors) in an image. It tolerates gradual changes of texture to some extent for image segmentation. The purpose of the paper is to propose a practical method for image segmentation, which is always the first step to control a real intelligent control system.

Pneumatic Artificial Muscle in Biomedical Applications

The intention of this article is to introduce and overview Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs). The construction of PAMS mainly consist of flexible, inflatable membranes, having orthotropic material behaviour. The main properties shaping the PAMs will be explained in terms of their loadcarrying capacity and low weight in assembly. Discussion on their designs and capacity to function as locomotion device in robotics applications will be laid out, followed by viewpoint on the materials and strength models, concluded by some future directions in this research work.