Hiromi Watanabe

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Hiromi Watanabe is a leading researcher in field robotics, specializing in autonomous navigation for challenging outdoor and forestry environments. Her work focuses on enabling mobile robots and heavy forestry vehicles to operate safely and effectively on rough, unstructured terrain. A key contribution is her development of a LiDAR-SLAM and U-Net-based system for forest road surface detection, which allows robots to autonomously follow passable paths despite changes in geometry, surface conditions, and lighting. She has also advanced 3D scan matching techniques for mobile robot localization over rough terrain, addressing the critical problem of odometry errors when traveling on uneven ground. Earlier in her career, she designed a wide-range ultrasonic range finder for outdoor robots, capable of detecting both close obstacles and distant landmarks. Her most-cited works, including her 2021 and 2019 papers, each with 5 citations, demonstrate the foundational impact of her research on autonomous navigation in unstructured environments. Watanabe’s work is essential reading for researchers in field robotics, autonomous vehicles, and forestry automation.