Professor Daisuke Chugo, School of Engineering, received the BEST PRESENTATION PAPER Award at the 17th IEEE International Conference on Human System Interaction (HSI2025).

Professor Daisuke Chugo, School of Engineering, received the BEST PRESENTATION PAPER Award. This award is given to the best presentation out of a total of 70 presentations given at the conference. The award is given on the basis of a comprehensive finding out of the academic quality as well as practicality and applicability to society. The title of the winning paper by Prof. Chugo et al. is "Pedestrian estimation in blind spots of external sensors using BLE Beacons and mobile robot navigation based on this information". This presentation proposes a method for autonomous robots to predict the presence of pedestrians and safely navigate through the city using BLE Beacons emitted by pedestrians' smartphones, even if the robots cannot directly see the approaching pedestrians (e.g. pedestrians are behind a turn).
The Service Robotics Laboratory, led by Prof. Chugo, has been developing more practical technologies for autonomous mobile robots through participating in the Tsukuba Challenge, and this technology will be applied to robots competing in the Tsukuba Challenge 2025 to be held in December this year.

Title of paper:
Pedestrian estimation in blind spots of external sensors using BLE Beacons and mobile robot navigation based on this information
Author of the paper:
Seunghyun Kim (4th year student, School of Engineering, Kwansei Gakuin University)
Kazuki Fujiwara (School of Engineering, Kwansei Gakuin University, completed March 2025)
Daisuke Chugo (Professor, School of Engineering, Kwansei Gakuin University)
Satoshi Muramatsu (Associate Professor, School of Information Science and Technology, Tokai University)
Sho Yokota (Professor, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Toyo University)
Jin-Hua She (Professor, School of Engineering, Tokyo University of Technology)
Hiroshi Hashimoto (Professor, Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology)