Summer 2020 Research and Scholarship

Hi everyone!   My name is Hannah, and I am researching under LAIR this summer with Prof. Clark!   My partner, Olivia, and I have kicked off the summer with working on a Particle Filter. The basic idea of a particle filter is that it can be used as a localization technique. In our case, we are working on coding up a Particle Filter that will run on our Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) so that it can estimate the location of a shark the AUV is tracking.       A Particle Filter works by creating a collection of random particles, and each particle is its own estimate of the shark’s position. These random particles have a ‘weight’ or importance factor. The weights associated with each particle are updated according to how close the particle is from the AUV’s most recent measurement of the shark’s position. The equation used for this update is a Gaussian function. An easy way to think of the weight is that a higher weight assumes that the particle has more importan...

        Hello! I’m Hugo, a student researcher in the LAIR. I work on the Microglider team, where we are trying to develop autonomous underwater glider robots. This robot will float and sink to reach operator-selected depths, controlled by electrolysis and vibration-assisted bubble leak. This will cause the robot to move laterally as lift forces act on the wings on the side of the glider. Among the work we have completed is a prototype of the robot that can float and sink under human control, a PD control system to set robot depth, and characterization of the robot’s electrolysis and leak rates. We want to model the robot using a simulation that includes the robot’s vertical and lateral position, as well as its pitch (tilting forward and backward). This simulation can then be translated into a control system that integrates robot dynamics, leak rate, and electrolysis rate to convert user inputs into desired robot position outputs. So far, I have already coded th...

Greetings and welcome to our new summer blog. I am hoping that many of our remote researchers and scholars are able to share their current work with the rest of the community. My lab, the "LAIR" or Lab for Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics has kicked off the summer well, with students Ginger Schmidt, Hannah Kyme, Linda Li, Yuki Wang, Hugo So, Alicia Lu, and Oliva Tuffli all making solid contributions in the first week. Sadly we won't be doing any fieldwork. We are usually deploying underwater robots from Catalina Island, or off the coast of Malta. Luckily, our previous research teams have collected a large amount of data that we will be analyzing and using to motivate the development of new robot planning and control algorithms. Figure 1: Deploying our AUV from a boat a few miles off the coast of Malta. One key dataset will be the hundreds of shark trajectories that we have previously extracted from aerial video: Figure 2: A video from La Jolla shores (cour...