Tetsuo Furukawa

About

Tetsuo Furukawa is a robotics and computational intelligence researcher whose work centers on self-organizing neural architectures, autonomous robot control, and adaptive decision-making systems. His most significant contribution is the development and application of the Modular Network Self-Organizing Map (mnSOM), an innovative extension of the classical SOM framework that replaces traditional vector units with functional modules, dramatically enhancing representational capacity and enabling both segmentation and interpolation of complex robotic behaviors. Furukawa applied mnSOM extensively to mobile robot task segmentation — demonstrating how robots can autonomously partition navigation tasks into meaningful subtasks — and further refined these methods by incorporating spatio-temporal contiguity constraints for more coherent clustering. His work on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is particularly notable, addressing challenging real-world problems in motion control, sensor integration, collision avoidance, and self-localization within unpredictable deep-ocean environments. He also explored higher-rank SOM architectures for shape space estimation, broadening the theoretical reach of self-organizing systems. Across approximately a dozen publications spanning 2006 to 2012, Furukawa accumulated around 70 citations, reflecting a focused and technically substantive body of work that advances intelligent, adaptive autonomy in robotic systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Task segmentation in a mobile robot by mnSOM: a new approach to training expert modules

   17 citations · 2007
2. 2
   A New Approach to Task Segmentation in Mobile Robots by mnSOM

   11 citations · 2006
3. 3
   An Online Adaptation Control System Using mnSOM

   8 citations · 2006
4. 4
   Self-Organizing Decision-Making System for AUV

   6 citations · 2007
5. 5
   Task segmentation in a mobile robot by mnSOM and clusteringwith spatio-temporal contiguity

   6 citations · 2009
6. 6
   Shape space estimation by higher-rank of SOM

   5 citations · 2012
7. 7
   Task Segmentation in a Mobile Robot by mnSOM and Clustering with Spatio-temporal Contiguity

   5 citations · 2008
8. 8
   An adaptive controller system using mnSOM

   4 citations · 2006
9. 9
   An Adaptive Neural Network Control System using mnSOM

   4 citations · 2006
10. 10
    A Self-Organizing Decision Making System for AUVs

    3 citations · 2006

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links