Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The goal of this three-year project is to explore the science and technology of underwater robotics, with particular emphasis on the computational, information science and software infrastructure for underwater sensing, planning, and mobility control. While the underwater domain serves as out technological focus, it should be noted that it is a prototypical unstructured environment and shares many characteristics in common with other domains of interest. Specifically, within this project we propose to develop technology to support fully autonomous underwater vehicles that operate in and about shallow-water environments (under 100ft). This work leverages and exploits technologies and infrastructure developed in a prior IRIS NCE project entitled AQUA (see [Georgiades2004, Dudek2005]) in which prototype technologies for an underwater vehicle were developed and an ongoing T-GAP project AQUATAR that is developing a teleoperated version of the AQUA vehicle. While these efforts were highly successful, numerous longer term scientific issues remain to be resolved and these are the focus of the current proposal. In order to focus and unify the research that will take place within this project direct our research efforts to the development of a robotic vehicle that can perform surveillance underwater structures with a specific focus of underwater environmental assesment, but with many other potential applications as well.