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Introduction to ViaLab (Sept. 2020 ~ )

The 4th industrial revolution,(Industry 4.0) is the ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices using modern smart technologies, such as Internet of things (IoT), cyber-physical systems (CPS), cloud computing, intelligent robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It will fundamentally change the way we live, work, and relate to one another with unprecedented scale, scope, and complexity. Fusing the last decade of our R&D experiences on smart systems with the newly emerging AI technology, our research activity in the Vehicle Intelligence and Autonomy Lab (ViaLab) focuses on the enabling technologies of unmanned autonomous vehicles, such as self-driving cars, pipeline robots, and autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs).

Self-driving Cars for Smart Mobility

A self-driving car is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and moving safely without human intervention. One of the key challenges in self-driving car is the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to achieve human-level perception and understanding of driving environment.

The video below shows two different approaches to visual perception of urban road images in front of PNU main gate: object detection (left) and semantic segmentation (right). The objection detection network classifies the type of an object and localizes it using the bounding box, while the semantic segmentation network partitions an image into multiple segments each of which represents the type of object. Our object detection network is trained to directly recognize the phase of horizontal traffic light in Korean roads, which is a basic requirement of level-4 autonomous driving. The semantic segmentation network can be used to extract the drivable road area where the planning task figures out a collision-free path.

We also connect our computation server with the vehicle actuation system via X-by-wire interface so that the control signal can be converted to the adaptive cruise commends of commercial vehicle (Hyundai SONATA):

Pipeline Robots for Non-Destructive In-Line Inspection

We are currently collaborating with KOGAS reseach team

Autonomous Ground Vehicle Control System (ACS) for Smart Factory

To coordinate the access of multiple AGVs to the shared resources, such as intersection, we are currently developing an open-source, platform-independent, and vendor-independent AGV control system (ACS) which will be actually deployed in a factory of Sungwoo HiTech in Nov. 2022.

The video below shows that our ACS can successfully coordinate the simultaneous access of two Aichi CarryBee AGVs to the intersection (around 1:00 of the video play):

Introduction to NSSLab (Sept. 2008 ~ Aug. 2020)

During the last a few decades, we have witnessed the Internet revolution which has significantly changed our daily life. As a result, wherever we are, whatever we do, we are always connected to the Internet through the wired/wireless network infrastructure, which can be seen as (human-centric) ubiquitous networking. However, this megatrend doesn’t have to be confined to the ubiquitous communication among between human beings. For example, in recent years, we have witnessed the explosive market growth of the SMARTPHONE which is an embedded computer system capable of accessing to the Internet via cellular or Wi-Fi networks. Another example would be a SMART-GRID system which is a new era of electric power systems via interconnection with the Internet.

We strongly believe that this revolution will continue to the networking of the SMART SYSTEMS, which can be defined as the device-centric (or machine-centric) networking. In the networked smart systems (NSS) laboratory, we attempt to study the state-of-the-art technologies to resolve many related issues in the networking of such smart systems including SMART VEHICLES and SMART NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE.

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