Gabriele Ferri1, Alessandro Faggiani2, Tommaso Fabbri2, Fausto Ferreira3
1RAMI 2023 Technical Director 2RAMI2023 Deputy Technical Director 3VP Workshops & Symposia
NATO-STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) has been organising Student AUV Challenge – Europe (SAUC-E), the premier European student competition for underwater vehicles, since 2010. Over the years, we have been fostering autonomy and robotics in different events such as euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge and the European Robotics League Emergency 2017, involving the use of multi-domain cooperative teams of robots in search and rescue scenarios. euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge, organised in the framework of the euRathlon EU project, was the first world’s multi-domain robotics competition. Disaster response tasks were proposed to teams composed of land, sea and air robots and were held at a real power plant site, specifically Tor del Sale in Piombino, Italy. The inspiration came from the Fukushima 2011 accident.
This formula of multi-domain competitions has continued with the European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency. ERL is a common framework for robotics competition funded by the European Union. ERL was launched in 2016 in three vibrant fields of robotics: industrial, service and emergency robots. The first season culminated with the ERL Emergency 2017, a multi-domain competition again locally organised by CMRE at the Tor del Sale power plant site in Piombino. ERL Emergency 2018 and 2019 took place again in La Spezia and were planned to take place in 2020 and 2021 but the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to have physical competitions.
Following this tradition, we have started in 2022 a new competition named Robotics for Asset Inspection and Maintenance (RAMI). RAMI is part of the ERL Emergency League and is organised in the framework of the EU-funded METRICS project (https://metricsproject.eu/) aiming at addressing Inspection & Maintenance (I&M) tasks achieved in risky and/or hostile environments where human intervention is challenging or impossible, where direct link with an operator could not be guaranteed and where autonomous decisions are necessary to reduce operational time of the inspection tasks and ensure repeatability while maintaining an appropriate safety level for the mission. RAMI proposes events for aerial robots, organised by CATEC (Spain), and for underwater vehicles organised by CMRE.
RAMI consists of both virtual and field competitions. At CMRE, we have organised two virtual competitions (https://metricsproject.eu/inspection-maintenance/rami-cascade-campaign-marine-2023/). In such competitions a dataset of images of underwater objects of potential interest (OPIs) are provided to teams, which are requested to develop the adequate software in order to classify, identify and localise images of OPIs of a test dataset. These virtual or cascade competitions are important to prepare teams for the field events and to attract researchers from other domains to tackle with underwater image processing challenges.
The first field event for marine robots was organised at CMRE seawater basin in July 2022. In this report, we present the second RAMI event, recently held at CMRE in July 2023.
The competition
CMRE hosted this year the RAMI23 robotics competition from 16 to 21 July. The competition took place in CMRE seawater basin. The areas were prepared to simulate an Oil & Gas plant in a harbour connecting it to the general theme of the RAMI competition: Inspection & Maintenance (I&M). To support teams’ growth, we proposed tasks similar to those present in ERL Emergency 2019 and in RAMI22.
The RAMI marine competition tasks are inspired by the following user story:
An Oil&Gas offshore site has to be investigated after that a malfunction has been reported by the plant safety systems. From what is known, a pipeline has started leaking and an explosion may occur soon.
A robotic team composed of underwater robots (AUVs) is ready to intervene. It is time for the emergency team to act. The priorities are to reach the area of the accident, and to assess and quantify the entity of the leak. Then the robots have to reach the pipe assembly area for quantifying the damage to the plant and for identifying which pipe has been damaged and is responsible for the leak. Finally, the robots must intervene on the plant itself by closing a valve to stop the leak to prevent the explosion and further damages to the environment.
Underwater robots were challenged to inspect a pipe structure, reach several waypoints and pass through a validation gate. In addition, several buoys of four possible colors had to be detected, localised and their colour recognised. A different action was requested to the teams depending on the buoy color: for instance, turning around the buoy in a clock-wise circle or stopping for 30 seconds increasing the depth. The objective was to force teams to integrate perception with adaptive mission planning in a realistic environment such as CMRE water basin. Finally, three manipulation tasks were proposed, specifically staying into contact with the pipe, valve closing and picking a stick, bringing that to the surface in a controlled way. These tasks were the only ones allowed to be performed through teleoperation (ROV mode), while all other tasks had to be performed autonomously. As in the previous editions, the challenges were held at the CMRE waterfront sea basin, which is a sheltered harbor, providing participants with the opportunity to grapple with real-life sea conditions, including limited visibility and salty water, but within a safe, controlled environment. The limited visibility added severe difficulties to object recognition by AUVs, even if the targets were bright orange or red in color.
We have noticed that, despite the COVID-19 interruption and related issues for the students, teams’ performance generally has been improving over the past years, especially for entries with experience in our competitions. UNIFI Robotics Team (Italy), in particular, accomplished several tasks, showing a good maturity in navigation, survey, buoy localization and manipulation. For the first time in our competitions, a buoy was classified correctly in real-time and the appropriate autonomous behaviour was triggered (the AUV changed depth in a controlled way). The other buoys were also localised, classified and identified in post-processing with good accuracy. All the teams were able to deploy their AUV in the water and to score some achievements. ITU AUV Team from the Istanbul Technical University (Turkey), for instance, was a rookie team in RAMI events. The team was the winner of the Singapore SAUVC 2022. SAUVC, sponsored by OES as well, is held in a swimming pool and targets at more junior teams. Despite some problems and difficulties in adapting to the sea scenario, they were able to accomplish manipulation tasks in the last day, showing good capabilities of adaptation and improvement in performance over the event week. This is extremely encouraging showing how competitions all around the world can be a common training ground for teams to grow and improve.
Further work has to be done to improve the performance of teams in real-time perception and related adaptive mission planning. Cascade competitions can help in this aspect.
Finally, for the first time in our event, we organised a student poster competition. This was an opportunity to further increase contacts and involvement between teams and the international experts present at the event.
The participant teams
This year 5 teams attended the event. Four teams attempted the competition tasks, while a fifth team only practiced in the arenas. It is to be noticed that after the COVID19 pandemic, some teams lost continuity as students graduate and there was no overlap between older generations and younger ones. This is why it is important to organise annual competitions and to support team participation, facilitating the succession with the required handover of experience. To start again after the COVID-19 period, we think it is pivotal to involve people with the aim to strengthen the community, and to contact and involve as much as possible participants and potential sponsors. This year, we had the participation of three teams at their first participation in our competitions, and the other two had attended many of our past events. This good mixture of new and veteran teams shows how RAMI/ERL is today a fixed appointment for several European research groups, and continues to attract new venues.
The participant teams were:
- ITU AUV Team from the Istanbul Technical University in Turkey was the winner of the Singapore SAUVC 22, a competition held in a swimming pool. They participated in RAMI23 for the first time with their Taluy AUV.
- 2. NAUTILUS Team consisted of three people, from ESTACA School of Engineering in France. They were at their first participation in one of our competitions.
- UNIFI Robotics Team, from the University of Florence, Italy. A veteran of our competitions (first participation in 2012). They participated in RAMI23 with their FeelHippo AUV.
- OUBOT, from the Obuda University, Budapest, Hungary. This team had participated in euRathlon 2015 and ERL Emergency 2017. In these competitions, they participated thanks to an AUV loaned by the organisation. Then, they built their own robot to participate in our events.
- Team ERGO from the University of Pisa, Italy. Their robot, a Zeno vehicle manufactured by MDM Team company, was used mostly for practicing in the area and collecting optical and acoustic imaging. This is important in view of a future participation of the team in our events.
The winners
RAMI 2023 proposed one Task Benchmark (TBM) in a different competition day: Pipeline area inspection on Wednesday, Intervention on the pipeline structure on Thursday and finally the Complete mission at the plant on Friday. TBMs are oriented to task fulfillment and are judged by judges in real-time, or scrutinizing the data produced by teams within one hour from the end of their time-slot. On the other hand, Functionality Benchmarks (FBMs) aim to evaluate robot functionalities, such as mapping capabilities. They are evaluated after the competition by analyzing the output data from the teams.
UNIFI Robotics Team stood out in the three TBMs, winning all of the TBMs and having a draw in the Intervention on the pipeline with OUBOT team. UNIFI Robotics Team was finally awarded with the SAUC-E 2023 award, the best team over all the proposed TBMs.
Furthermore, UNIFI Robotics Team also was first in rank in the FBMs involving mapping the area (detecting and localizing the coloured buoys) and object recognition (classifying and identifying the coloured buoys).
Other prizes awarded were:
- “Best team SAUC-E award” (best team of the rankings over the three TBMs): UNIFI Robotics Team – voucher from Breaking the Surface sponsor.
- “Best presentation” (teams were asked to give a presentation on their robot and team): ITU AUV Team – voucher from Breaking the Surface sponsor.
- IEEE OES Innovation Award Plaque – UNIFI Robotics Team – 300 $ from IEEE OES sponsor.
- “Best rookie team”: NAUTILUS Team.
- “Most improved vehicle award”: OUBOT – ping sonar from Blue Robotics sponsor.
- “Best student poster” – Simone Tani “Comparison of Monocular and Stereo Vision Approaches for Structure Inspection using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles,” ERGO Team – voucher from Breaking the Surface sponsor.
Feedback
The feedback from both the participants and the judges was very positive. We have noticed a general improvement in teams’s performance. In particular, we had good results in tasks involving the combination of real-time perception with autonomous behaviours. For instance, UNIFI Team was capable, for the first time in our competitions, to detect a buoy in real-time, to determine its colour and to react with the required behaviour. This witnesses how proposing the same tasks over different editions can support the gradual growth of participant teams. At the same time, it is felt the need to keep or create some simple tasks for the newcomers (we had two rookie teams this year). We will try to achieve this trade-off between more complex and more basic tasks in the future, to be attractive for both new entries, and for more experienced teams, which require to be pushed by more challenging missions. The realistic scenario, which attracts participants, is also central to involve end-users and companies. This year, for instance, we had one judge from ROSEN group and many judges from the U.S., interested in our realistic set-up. Results of RAMI23 showed, for most of the teams, good performance in autonomous navigation, mapping and imaging. However, in general, more work and support are needed for real-time perception and autonomy. This will be addressed in the future campaigns. In the ongoing cascade campaign, we provided teams with an underwater image dataset for developing image processing software. This is important to prepare teams to challenge with real-world conditions; especially when there is a lack of available datasets in the underwater domain to support the development and the validation of image processing algorithms.
The judges
We had more than 30 judges and observers from Europe and U.S., both from companies, academia and research institutions. In particular, this year’s edition saw a large presence of judges and experts from the U.S. We had people from key-players in the Oil&Gas field, such as ROSEN group (Germany), DLR (Germany), FINCANTIERI and Leonardo (Italy). From the U.S. we had the strong presence and support of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Other judges were present from NRL, Spawar and RoboNation. As in previous competitions, CMRE provided the full engineering and logistical support during the event execution. Teams were supported by CMRE logistics, having access to a good support, since engineers and technicians helped the teams with suggestions and supply parts. This was appreciated by teams and is crucial in helping teams to solve the unavoidable technical issues. Teams’ general feedback was very positive regarding the marine trial area and the way the scenario was setup.
The local community was also engaged. Local schools from the La Spezia area were also involved in the framework of Giona’s Project. This allowed around 20 students close to high school graduation to come and interact with the teams.
Sponsors
As in previous years, IEEE OES played a fundamental role as the Main Sponsor. IEEE OES supported team travel and participation. This is essential to attract teams and allow them to take part in such complex events. One of the RAMI goals is to educate future multi-disciplinary engineers. Therefore, the sponsorship of ‘Breaking the Surface’ 2023, the 15th Interdisciplinary Field Workshop of Marine Robotics and Applications, is well aligned with our mission. The organisers of ‘Breaking the Surface’ provided complimentary registrations for three students. These students had the opportunity to participate in the 15th edition of this multi-disciplinary and educational workshop that since 2019 counts with the IEEE OES sponsorship.
As in the past, we again had the marine robotics commercial sector involved. Blue Robotics gave a Ping sonar to the team that won the ‘Most improved vehicle’ award. Other sponsors were Fincantieri and ROV-Expert.
Our aim is to continue to develop RAMI as a unique event that challenges teams with realistic conditions, with an emphasis on precise metrological evaluation. These achievements were made possible thanks to the fundamental support of IEEE OES and all our other sponsors. We thank all the teams, judges, presenters, visitors, staff and everyone involved, who made RAMI 2023 such as a successful event.
Suleman Mazhar has been working as a professor in Information & Communication Engineering at Harbin Engineering University (China) since July 2019. He did PhD from Tokyo University (Japan) and postdoctorate from Georgetown University (Washington DC, USA). He had BS-CS from FAST-NUCES (Lahore) and MS from GIK Institute (Pakistan). He is TYSP young scientist fellow (Ministry of Science & Technology China) and have won several research grants from international organizations such as DAAD (Germany), ICIMOD (Nepal), NRPU (Higher Education Commission Pakistan), WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) Pakistan. His research focus is deep learning and signal processing applications for environmental monitoring, with particular focus on underwater acoustics, and marine mammal conservation. He is a reviewer for professional journals such as Journal of Acoustical Society (America), IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE Sensors Journal, Applied Acoustics, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Peng Ren is a full professor with the College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China). He is the director of Qingdao International Research Center for Intelligent Forecast and Detection of Oceanic Catastrophes. He received the K. M. Scott Prize from the University of York, the Natural Science award (first rank) from China Institute of Electronics, and the Eduardo Caianiello Best Student Paper Award from 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing as one co-author. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
Mohd Rizal Arshad is a full professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia, where he specializes in ocean robotics technology and intelligent system. He received his B.Eng. in Medical Electronics & Instrumentation and PhD in Electronic Engineering from University of Liverpool, UK in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He completed his MSc. in Electronic Control Engineering from the University of Salford, UK in Dec 1995. He has supervised many postgraduate students and published extensively in local and international publications. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and was awarded IEEE OES Presidential Award in 2019.
Itzik Klein is an Assistant Professor, heading the Autonomous Navigation and Sensor Fusion Lab, at the Charney School of Marine Sciences, Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN) Editorial Board. Prior to joining the University of Haifa, he worked at leading companies in Israel on navigation topics for more than 15 years. He has a wide range of experience in navigation systems and sensor fusion from both industry and academic perspectives. His research interests lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence with inertial sensing, sensor fusion, and autonomous underwater vehicles.
John R. Potter (IEEE M’94, SM’02, F’18) graduated in the previous century with a joint honours Mathematics and Physics Degree from Bristol and a PhD. in Glaciology and Oceanography from Cambridge, UK studying Antarctic ice mass balance, where he spent four consecutive summers. This work helped underscore the non-linear fragility of polar ice to climate change and led to him receiving the Polar Medal from Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Nick is a Visiting Fellow at the UK National Oceanographic Center, Southampton His nomination was endorsed by the Underwater Acoustics Technology Committee. He had worked as a Research Associate and Lecturer at University of Birmingham and has been working as a Research Scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin. He has also served as a Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research Global. He is a senior member of IEEE (OES) and a Fellow of Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Nick has also been serving as Assoc. Editor for IEEE JoE and JASA. He is widely acknowledged for his expertise are seabed acoustics, parametric array modeling, sonar beamformer, underwater signal processing.
Maurizio Migliaccio (M’91-SM’00-F’17) is Full professor of Electromagnetics at Università di Napoli Parthenope (Italy) and was Affiliated Full Professor at NOVA Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL (USA). He has been teaching Microwave Remote Sensing since 1994. He was visiting scientist at Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Lüft und Raumfahrt (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. He was member of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) scientific committee. He was member of the ASI CosmoSkyMed second generation panel. He was e-geos AdCom member. He was Italian delegate of the ESA PB-EO board. He was Member of South Africa Expert Review Panel for Space Exploration. He serves as reviewer for the UE, Italian Research Ministry (MIUR), NCST, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong Research board. He lectured in USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Italy. He was Italian delegate at UE COST SMOS Mode Action. He is listed in the Italian Top Scientists. He is an IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing AE, International Journal of Remote Sensing AE, and was IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering AE Special Issue on Radar for Marine and Maritime Remote Sensing, IEEE JSTARS AE of the Special Issue on CosmoSKyMed, Member of the Indian Journal of Radio & Space Physics Editorial board. His main current scientific interests cover SAR sea oil slick and man-made target monitoring, remote sensing for marine and coastal applications, remote sensing for agriculture monitoring, polarimetry, inverse problems for resolution enhancement, reverberating chambers. He published about 160 peer-reviewed journal papers on remote sensing and applied electromagnetics.
He has developed various types of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and related application technologies including navigation methods, a new sensing method using a chemical sensor, precise seafloor mapping methods, a precise seabed positioning system with a resolution of a few centimeters, a new sensing system of the thickness of cobalt-rich crust; and more. He has shown, by using these technologies that AUVs are practicable and valuable tools for deep-sea exploration.
Donna Kocak has had an outstanding career in defense and scientific projects developing and applying solutions in subsea optics, imaging and robotics. She graduated with an M.Sc in Computer Science in 1997 from the University of Central Florida; an MBA in 2008 from the University of Florida; and M.Sc in Industrial Engineering in 2011 from the University of Central Florida. She is currently a Senior Scientist, Advanced Concepts Engineering, and Fellow at the Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida, where she has developed novel optical imaging and communication solutions for under-sea defense and scientific projects. Prior to 2008 Donna Kocak was Founder and President of Green Sky Imaging, LLC (GSI) who developed laser/video photogrammetry software for underwater inspection and survey. Her earlier career positions were with Naval Training Systems Center, Florida; Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Florida; eMerge Interactive; and the Advanced Technologies Group in Florida.
John Potter has a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics from Bristol University in the UK and a PhD in Glaciology and Oceanography from the University of Cambridge on research in the Antarctic, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal in 1988. John has worked on polar oceanography, underwater acoustics, ambient noise (including imaging), marine mammals, communications, IoUT, autonomous vehicles and strategic development. He has 40 years’ international experience working at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK, NATO in Italy, SIO in California, NUS in Singapore and most recently at NTNU in Norway. John is a Fellow of the IEEE and MTS, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE OES Distinguished Lecturer, PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer & an International Fellow of the Explorer’s Club.
Dr. James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and elected as a Life Member (Fellow) at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy was awarded the Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America for his technical contributions. He has published over 225 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, “Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), “Signal Processing: the Modern Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006) and “Bayesian Signal Processing: Classical, Modern and Particle Filtering” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2009). He was the General Chairman of the inaugural 2006 IEEE Nonlinear Statistical Signal Processing Workshop held at the Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing, Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing and Bayesian Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society/ASA. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on “Sonar Signal and Image Processing” and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on “Signal Processing in Acoustics” as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line JASAXL). He was recently nominated for the Vice Presidency of the ASA and elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE OES. His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.
Kenneth Foote is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University in 1973. He was an engineer at Raytheon Company, 1968-1974; postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University of Technology, 1974-1975; research fellow and substitute lecturer at the University of Bergen, 1975-1981. He began working at the Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, in 1979; joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1999. His general area of expertise is in underwater sound scattering, with applications to the quantification of fish, other aquatic organisms, and physical scatterers in the water column and on the seafloor. In developing and transitioning acoustic methods and instruments to operations at sea, he has worked from 77°N to 55°S.
René Garello, professor at Télécom Bretagne, Fellow IEEE, co-leader of the TOMS (Traitements, Observations et Méthodes Statistiques) research team, in Pôle CID of the UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC.
Professor Mal Heron is Adjunct Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is CEO of Portmap Remote Ocean Sensing Pty Ltd. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
Hanu Singh graduated B.S. ECE and Computer Science (1989) from George Mason University and Ph.D. (1995) from MIT/Woods Hole.He led the development and commercialization of the Seabed AUV, nine of which are in operation at other universities and government laboratories around the world. He was technical lead for development and operations for Polar AUVs (Jaguar and Puma) and towed vehicles(Camper and Seasled), and the development and commercialization of the Jetyak ASVs, 18 of which are currently in use. He was involved in the development of UAS for polar and oceanographic applications, and high resolution multi-sensor acoustic and optical mapping with underwater vehicles on over 55 oceanographic cruises in support of physical oceanography, marine archaeology, biology, fisheries, coral reef studies, geology and geophysics and sea-ice studies. He is an accomplished Research Student advisor and has made strong collaborations across the US (including at MIT, SIO, Stanford, Columbia LDEO) and internationally including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, India, Sweden and Norway. Hanu Singh is currently Chair of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Technology Committee on Autonomous Marine Systems with responsibilities that include organizing the biennial IEEE AUV Conference, 2008 onwards. Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2007-2011. Associate editor, Journal of Field Robotics 2012 onwards.
Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. She was a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2008 joined Northeastern University, where she is currently a Professor of electrical and computer engineering. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Milica’s research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic systems. She has made pioneering contributions to underwater acoustic communications, and her work has been widely cited. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and serves as an Associate Editor for its Journal of Oceanic Engineering (and in the past for Transactions on Signal Processing and Transactions on Vehicular Technology). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the IEEE Communication Letters, and chairs the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning. Milica is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE/OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.
Dr. Paul C. Hines was born and raised in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. From 1977-1981 he attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with a B.Sc. (Hon) in Engineering-Physics.