Department of Systems and Control Engineering Faculty of Engineering University of Malta

A Series of Public Lectures on Technologies for Underwater Exploration

The Department of Systems and Control Engineering is organizing a series of three public talks on technologies for underwater exploration by guest speakers from California Polytechnic State University, The Aurora Trust and the Department of Classics & Archaeology. The first talk, by Dr. Zoe Wood from California Polytechnic State University, is entitled Visualization of underwater data. This will be held on the 13th March 2012 at 16:00 in Room MP101, Maths and Physics Building. The second talk, by Dr. Timmy Gambin from The Aurora Trust and the Department of Classics & Archaeology - University of Malta, is entitled Remote Sensing at Sea: an end users tale. This will be held on the 20th March 2012 at 16:00 in Room MP101, Maths and Physics Building. The third talk, by Dr. Christopher Clark from California Polytechnic State University, is entitled Tracking Sharks with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. This will be held on the 23rd March 2012 at 16:00 in the Engineering Lecture Theatre, Engineering Building. All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.

Talk Abstracts Visualization of underwater data Dr. Zoe Wood

This talk will discuss the visualization of underwater science and geometric data acquired by underwater robots. Specific applications in the field of marine biology and archeology are discussed. The implementation of various methods taken from scientic visualization, real time rendering, and scattered data interpolation are presented along with visualization results. The science data application includes visualizations of the surrounding terrain, the ability to map various science data to glyphs, control over color mapping, and scattered data interpolation. In addition, we present a methodology and algorithm for the reconstruction of three-dimensional geometric models of ancient Maltese water storage systems, i.e. cisterns, from sonar data.

Remote Sensing at Sea: an end users tale Dr. Timmy Gambin

The recent development of marine remote sensing technology has opened up the underwater world to researchers and scientists. However, there is sometimes a gap between the developers (engineers and computer programmers) and end user scientists working out at sea (biologists, archaeologists and geologists). Parallel work often leads to frustrating situations that could have been identified and solved at the initial stages of development. In this talk I will present the hardware, software and methodologies used for remote sensing projects at sea from an archaeologists perspective. The talk is illustrated with examples from a number of projects that have been executed in the ambit of multi-disciplinary research.

Tracking Sharks with Autonomous Vehicles Dr. Christopher Clark

Underwater

This talk will present our recent progress in using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to autonomously track and follow sharks tagged with acoustic transceivers. To start, a method for estimating the 2D planar position, velocity, and orientation states of a tagged shark will be discussed. The method is designed for implementation

on an AUV equipped with a stereo-hydrophone and receiver system that detects acoustic signals transmitted by a tag. The particular hydrophone system used here provides a measurement of relative bearing angle to the tag, but does not provide the sign (+ or -) of the bearing angle. A Particle Filter was used for fusing these measurements over time to produce a state estimate of the tag location. The Particle Filter combined with an active control system allowed the system to overcome the ambiguity in the sign of the bearing angle. This state estimator was validated by tracking both a stationary tag and moving tag with known positions. These experiments revealed state estimate errors were on par with those obtained by manually driven boat based tracking systems, the current method used for tracking fish and sharks over long distances. Final experiments involved the catching, releasing, and an autonomous AUV tracking of a 1 meter Leopard Shark (Triakis semifasciata) in SeaPlane Lagoon, Los Angeles, California. Next, our current work in developing a multi-robot controller will be presented. In this control problem, AUVs must determine control actions that keep them from coming within a predetermined distance of the shark (so as not to alter shark behavior), and distribute vehicles to enable complimentary sensor measurements that lead to decreased localization errors. In our solution, AUVs are programmed to circumnavigate a set of particles representing the sharks estimated position. Current simulation results will be presented.

For further information please contact: Prof. Simon G. Fabri. Tel. 2340 2079 Email simon.fabri@um.edu.mt