Cong Zheng

Harbin Engineering University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Cong Zheng is a leading researcher in autonomous underwater robotics, with a focus on enabling intelligent navigation and practical deployment in challenging marine environments. Her primary research areas include bathymetric simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), underwater terrain-aided navigation, and field robotics for aquaculture. Zheng’s most influential work, "Active Bathymetric SLAM for autonomous underwater exploration" (2022, 33 citations), introduces a novel framework that allows autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to actively plan their trajectories to reduce localization uncertainty, significantly improving mapping accuracy in unknown waters. In another highly cited paper (29 citations), she presents "A System for Autonomous Seaweed Farm Inspection with an Underwater Robot," which addresses the operational challenges of deploying AUVs in emerging large-scale seaweed farms on the Swedish west coast—a critical step toward sustainable aquaculture. Her earlier work on underwater digital elevation map gridding (10 citations) tackles the fundamental problem of inertial navigation drift by optimizing terrain reference positions for AUVs operating without GPS. Through these contributions, Zheng has advanced both the theoretical foundations of underwater navigation and the practical viability of robotic systems for ocean monitoring and food production.