KAIST wins second place in unmanned boat competition

It is belatedly known to the public that Korean research team participated and took the 2nd place in an international competition centered on technologies of the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV).

While unmanned self-driving vehicle technologies are quite advanced enough to be used in mass production, self-driving boat technologies are relatively underdeveloped. Against such backdrops, Korean research team’s great performance gives expectation that Korea may make headway in this field. KAIST Ocean Systems Engineering Department team led by Prof. Kim Jin-hwan announced on Thursday that "software integrated system" developed by the team won the 2nd prize in the "Maritime RobotX Challenge" organized by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, which took place first time from Oct. 20 to Oct. 26 in Marina Bay, Singapore.

First prize went to the U.S. MIT University. After the competition ended in October, KAIST brought the vessel used in the competition by ship to Korea and made public the news while showing a demonstration in Gapcheon Stream in Daejeon on Thursday. In the competition, each participant was given a competition ship by the organizer and developed only control software, which enhanced fairness of the competition. Individual team’s vessel must perform tasks without manual control by the user, such as autonomous driving through recognition of the course, searching underwater for acoustic sources, automatic approaching to the pier, remote observation of buoy, and avoidance and detection of obstacles. In total, 15 teams from Korea, the U.S., Australia, Japan and Singapore participated in the competition.

From Korea, KAIST, Seoul National University and Ulsan University competed. KAIST team won the second prize and a special prize from the competition supporter Northrop Grumman Corporation, an American defense technology company, totaling 16,500 U.S. dollars of prize money. Prof. Kim said, “We’ve exerted lots of efforts to enhance reliability of the software. Our budget to develop the software was around one fifth of that of MIT, which took the first prize. But our team’s performance was better in the preliminary round.”