Welcome to the 2020 Summer Research & Scholarship Blog!

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 (courtesy of A Nosal), where 100s of leopard sharks have aggregated.

Figure 3: Image processing highlighting automatic identification of sharks.

One of our larger projects is focussed on developing technology for enabling autonomous underwater robots to track and follow sharks. By analyzing the trajectories from such videos, we will be able to develop new (possibly Machine Learned) approaches to plan robot trajectories that minimize the likelihood of losing the shark and maximizing realtime shark trajectory tracking accuracy.

I am looking forward to reading everyone else's posts, so please share!