Recently, Dr. Kanna Rajan, the Principal Researcher in Autonomy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), was invited to visit Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

During the visit, Dr. Kanna Rajan made a report entitle "Finding the Proverbial Needle in the Coastal Ocean: Automated Reasoning for Sampling and Control", and gave a detailed and thoughdescription about the autonomy of underwater robots. Professor Xuemin Wu, vice director of SIA’s Office of General Affairs, outlined the history of SIA and its robot R&D status. Professor Yiping Li gave an introduction to the underwater robots developed in SIA. Professor Zhigang Li, youth staffs and students attended the meeting and conducted academic exchanges on the related technological problems. After the meeting, Dr. Kanna Rajan visited SIA’s Exhibition Hall of Scientific and Technological Achievements, accompanied by Tianxiang Liu of the Office of General Affairs and PhD candidate Shaowei Zhang.

Dr. Kanna Rajan is the Principal Researcher in Autonomy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, a privately funded non-profit oceanographic institute which he joined in 2005. Prior to that he was a Senior Research Scientist for the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Area at NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, California. His primary interests include automated planning/scheduling, modeling and representation for real world planners and agent architectures for distributed control applications.