D. Richard Blidberg, director of the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI) in the United States visited Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on September 27, 2012, giving a report named “the SAUV as a long term monitoring system: a collaboration research project with the University of South Florida”.
In his report, Blidberg mainly introduced AUSI’s latest progress in the research and application of Solar AUV (SAUV); the capability, application demands and major research directions of AUV in marine monitoring and investigation. He also talked about AUSI’s work and achievements on building the Autonomous Undersea Vehicle Applications Center (AUVAC) website. Wang Xiaohui, director of SIA’s Underwater Robotics Department introduced the research directions and progress of the department after the report. Blidberg spoke highly of the achievements of SIA in underwater robotics, and expressed the wish of introducing SIA’s research progress in AUV to the world through the AUVAC website. \
Blidberg received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in 1972. He co-founded the Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory (MSEL) at UNH in 1976. He is currently the director of AUSI in the United States, which he founded in 1993. He has written papers and reports on unmanned untethered submersible technology, as well as organized fifteen international symposia on AUV technology. He has over 60 publications related to AUV technology and served on several science and engineering committees, consulted for a number of companies, and been involved in several international collaborations. He is currently the associate editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering for underwater vehicle systems.
His present interests are focused on the development of technologies related to autonomous submersible vehicles and include the investigation of architectures for intelligent guidance and control of multiple autonomous vehicles, applied acoustic navigation, underwater robotics, and biologically-based solutions to vehicle system design. (Dai Tianjiao)
