ORE Seminar: Decision Making for Marine Robotics

April 27, 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Holmes Hall 247 & Zoom (see description for meeting ID and passcode)

Underwater gliders, propeller-driven submersibles, and other marine robots are increasingly being tasked with gathering information (e.g., in environmental monitoring, offshore inspection, and coastal surveillance scenarios). However, in most existing scenarios, human operators must carefully plan the mission to ensure completion of the task. Strict human oversight not only makes such deployments expensive and time consuming but also makes some tasks impossible due to the requirement for heavy cognitive loads or reliable communication between the operator and the vehicle. We can mitigate these limitations by making the underwater robotic systems semi-autonomous, where the human provides high-level input to the system and the robot fills in the details on how to execute the plan. In this talk, I will show how a general framework that unifies information theoretic optimization and robot motion planning makes semi-autonomous information gathering feasible in marine environments. I will leverage techniques from multi-robot coordination, reinforcement learning, and topological modeling to provide solutions for (1) multi-vehicle information gathering, (2) navigation with semantic commands, and (3) robust marine vehicle path execution. Finally, I will present results from a recent deployment in the Gulf of Mexico where a team of six heterogeneous underwater and surface vehicles successfully tracked multiple coastal upwelling fronts over a 10-day period using the proposed methods. This seminar will be given by Dr. Geoff Hollinger, Associate Professor in the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute at Oregon State University. Zoom Meeting ID: 960 4654 5799, Passcode: OREseminar


Event Sponsor
Ocean and Resources Engineering, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-7572, https://www.soest.hawaii.edu/ore/event/seminar_220427/

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