The jury results of the 51st International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva were recently announced. The project Unmanned Intelligent Surveying Technology and Equipment for Seabed Topography and Geomorphology, jointly developed by our institute and leading domestic partners, was awarded the Gold Medal with Congratulations of the Jury.
Led by Professor Wu Ziyin from the State Key Laboratory of Submarine Geoscience of our institute, the project addresses technical bottlenecks in efficient and high-precision seabed topography and geomorphology surveying in complex marine environments, particularly coastal transition zones and island-reef areas. Over more than a decade of joint research and development, the team has established a complete set of unmanned intelligent surveying technologies and equipment. Key innovations include a new generation of unmanned survey vessels with autonomous obstacle avoidance, trajectory control and multi-vessel cooperative control; a calibration-free, tilt-capable shallow-water multibeam echosounder system; and multibeam bathymetric data-processing and multi-feature fusion acoustic seabed classification software. The team also achieved coordinated formation control of 81 unmanned survey vessels and developed integrated multi-parameter surveying of water depth, seabed acoustic features, seabed targets and microtopography, doubling operational efficiency. The project has produced 280 research papers, 110 granted patents, six monographs and five technical standards, and has received five scientific and technological awards. The developed technologies and equipment have been widely applied in complex marine environments, including coastal island-reef zones, underwater engineering projects and deep-water navigation channels.
Founded in 1973, the Geneva International Inventions Exhibition is one of the world’s oldest and largest invention fairs, co-organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Federal Government of Switzerland, and the governments of the City and Canton of Geneva. This year’s exhibition showcased more than 1,000 innovative achievements from over 40 countries and regions, including 237 projects presented by the Chinese delegation. The Gold Medal with Congratulations of the Jury is the exhibition’s highest-tier gold award. Selected by the jury from among all gold medal-winning projects, the honor has an award rate of less than 3%.