Recently, three experts from the United States, Dr. David M. Fratantoni of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Senior Engineer William J. Kirkwood of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), and Dr. Fumin Zhang of Georgia Institute of Technology, visited Shenyang Institute of Automation （SIA）respectively. They all presented their latest research results and conducted in-depth discussions and communications with concerned researchers of SIA in the technological problems of underwater vehicles.
Dr. Fratantoni received his Ph. D in Meteorology and Physical Oceanography from University of Miami, and is an associate scientist of department of Physical Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Dr. Fratantoni’s research interests include observational studies of ocean circulation, investigation of mesoscale rings and eddies, exploration of the relationships between physics and biology on various scales, and development of autonomous platforms and observing systems. In SIA, he makes a presentation entitled Autonomy in Oceanography, in which he introduces the development status of underwater glider in the United States and the operating modes of underwater glider for observing ocean environment, and shows some interesting observational results of ocean environment by using underwater glider.
MBARI, founded in 1987, is an internationally famous research institution in marine science and marine technology field. Mr. Kirkwood has been engaged in the research and development of underwater vehicles since 1991, and he has developed the Dorado AUV, ALTEX AUV and Tiburon ROV as program manager. He also successfully applied these underwater vehicles to carry out a number of seafloor resource investigations, marine scientific explorations and other scientific tasks. Mr. Kirkwood introduces the latest underwater vehicles developed by MBARI through a presentation named MBARI Engineering: Technology for Ocean Exploration and Discovery.
Dr. Fumin Zhang is an assistant professor of Georgia Institute of Technology, and his research interests include the control method for underwater vehicle and mobile sensor network, battery modeling and control, and cyber-physical systems theory. This is the third time Dr. Zhang to visit SIA. He presents his newest research results about three-dimension cooperative exploration of multi-mobile observational sensors, which is based on three-dimension cooperative Kalman filter and Jacobi vector cooperative control method. These results supply the necessary theory foundations for realizing three-dimension ocean environment adaptive sampling using multiple underwater vehicles.
