Objective

The goal of my research is to enable autonomous remote exploration. Specifically, I am interested in creating new capabilities for robotic vehicles to sense, maneuver in, and interact with unknown, unstructured environments.

Seafloor Mosaicking

The goal of this project is to develop pilot aids for remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) to visually map out and navigate over the sea floor. This is a first step to developing fully autonomous systems, where the robot itself would have to deal with initialization, failures, planning and so on.

Just recently, I participated in a field deployment of this system on an expedition to the wreck of the airship USS Macon.

Collaborators: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

Publications: See my publications page.