ABSTRACT:

The field of robotics has grown dramatically over the last few years. In this talk, using examples from Marine Robotics, we trace some of the roots of our current efforts and then use those to motivate our work in areas with strong social relevance - Fisheries, Coral Reef Ecology, Oil Spills, and Marine Geology in the Arctic, and understanding the role of climate change in the Antarctic and how that is affecting the ecology of the Southern Ocean. We show how these applications have motivated fundamental analysis in the areas of SLAM, Imaging and Computer Vision and Autonomy. Finally, we look to the future to provide a vision about the challenges we will face in the coming decades. 

BIO:

Hanumant Singh is a Professor at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from the MIT WHOI Joint Program in 1995 after which he worked on the Staff at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution until 2016 when he joined Northeastern. His group has designed and built the Seabed AUV, as well as the Jetyak Autonomous Surface Vehicle, dozens of which are in use for scientific and academic research across the globe. He has participated in 60 expeditions in all of the world’s oceans in support of Marine Geology, Marine Biology, Deep Water Archaeology, Chemical Oceanography, Polar Studies, and Coral Reef Ecology. In collaboration with his students his awards include the ICRA Best Student Paper Award, the Sung Fu Memorial Best IEEE Transactions on Robotics Paper Award, and Best Paper Awards at the Oceans Conference and at AGU.