Statement of Thesis Research: Multi-Robot Sampling Strategies for Large-Scale Oceanographic Experiments

While my affiliation is to the Robotic Embedded Systems Lab at USC, I have worked with my advisor Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme to build up a collaboration with biologists and oceanographers both at USC and at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Funding from the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS), an NSF Science and Technology Center, allows me to work in this uniquely inter-disciplinary space where my primary interactions are with scientists in the pure sciences. My early work was in developing navigation and control algorithms for robotic boats used for study of HABs in marinas and lakes (de Menezes Pereira, Das, and Sukhatme 2008), which has had a direct effect on how water quality sensors are deployed and samples acquired. For my masters thesis, I designed and developed a prototype benthic robotic system deployed at the bottom of a body of water, enabling marine biologists to study the water column in a non-intrusive and energy-efficient manner (Das and Sukhatme 2009).