News

On Jun. 3, OKAMOTO Akihiro, Chief Researcher of the Underwater Robotics Research Group, Offshore Advanced Technology Department, and his colleagues received the Paper Award from the Japan Institute of Navigation (JIN).

Paper Title： Position Error Correction Method Using Circle Hough Transform for AUV Navigation

The recipients of the award: Akihiro Okamoto, Masahiko Sasano, Kangsoo Kim, Toshifumi Fujiwara

About awarded research: Since Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) cannot use satellite positioning information, the accumulation of positioning errors has to be overcome. Therefore, the process of positioning and error correction by acoustic devices from support vessels is operationally important. The winning paper describes a method for precisely detecting errors in data containing many outliers by applying the Hough transform, a well-known algorithm for detecting shapes in digital images, to AUV position estimates obtained through acoustic positioning and communications. The proposed method was applied to sea trials by using cruising AUVs in Suruga Bay, and it was shown that the position error correction is sufficiently practical.

(From left) Dr. Sasano, Group Leader, Mr. Okamoto, Chief Researcher,
Prof. Minami, Secretariat General of JIN, Dr. Kim, Senior Researcher
（Next-Generation Unmanned Ocean Vehicle Project Team Leader
at present）, Dr. Fujiwara, Managing Director for Research Affairs