Research

Artificial Intelligence Robots
Artificial intelligence (AI) is an important technology that supports daily social life and economic activities. It contributes greatly to the sustainable growth of Japan’s economy and solves various social problems. In recent years, AI has attracted attention as a key for growth in developed countries and developing countries. The attention has been focused mainly on developing new artificial intelligence information communication technology (ICT) and robot technology (RT). Although recently developed AI technology certainly excels in extracting certain patterns, there are many limitations in robotic applications. Most AI models are overly dependent on big data, lack a self-idea function, and are complicated. In our laboratory, rather than merely developing next-generation artificial intelligence technology in robots, we aim to develop a new concept of general-purpose intelligence cognition technology called “Artificially Intelligent Robots (AIR)”.

Underwater Sensor Networks
The scientific and technological revolution of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has begun in oceanography. Historically, humans have observed the ocean from outside the ocean to study it. In recent years, changes have been made to the interior of the ocean, and laboratories have been built on the seafloor. Approximately 70.8% of the Earth is covered by ocean and rivers. The Underwater Sensor Networks (USNs) is expected to be important for disaster prevention, ocean resource exploration, and underwater environmental monitoring. Different from traditional WSNs, the USNs has its own unique features, such as low reliability and narrow bandwidth. These features may be great challenges for the applications of USNs. Furthermore, the integration of the USNs with artificial intelligence has become a topic of increasing interest for oceanology research fields. The Cognitive Ocean Network (CONet) will become the mainstream of future ocean science and engineering development. Our laboratory firstly defined CONet in the world. The mission is to build USNs like the traditional WSNs, to provide real-time and reliable applications for marine fisheries, seabed mining, underwater detection, etc.