Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), based in Daejeon (Korea), has chosen SPARUS II AUV to be its research platform.
The Intelligent Robotic Autonomy and Perception (IRAP) Lab at KAIST, leaded by Dr. Ayoung Kim, focuses on robotics problems in civil and environmental engineering applications. Their main research interest and topics include perception-based environment mapping, intelligent sensor fusion, decision making and control of the robotic agents, robotic operation and navigation in GPS-denied environments (e.g., underwater, indoor).
KAIST team chose SPARUS II to be their first platform to start with autonomous underwater robotics for its open approach (ROS driven and reconfigurable hardware). Their current work consist on the integration of a Teledyne Blueview M-900 in the AUV payload area for the obtention of underwater acoustic images with the goal of the detecting objects in the seafloor. In the integration process, KAIST researchers collaborated with Prof. Lee (Kongju University), Dr. Park (ETRI) and Korean Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering (KRISO).
The Teledyne Blueview M-900 is a multibeam imaging sonar which is very compact, and allows an easy integration in SPARUS II payload area.
Our customer’s opinion: “The Sparus II is a very research-friendly platform, perfect for robotics students to get used to underwater robots. Integration and data collection were smooth due to the flexibility of the platform.”