Hari Vishnu, Bharath Kalyan, Venugopalan Pallayil, Rajat Mishra with inputs from SAUVC organizing committee, photos courtesy of Manu Ignatius and Hari
The 8th edition of SAUVC was organized from 23-26 September 2022 in the Singapore Polytechnic. Following in line with its consistent growth in previous editions, this edition was the largest ever in terms of team registration and second largest in terms of participation. This year saw 72 teams registering interest for the event, of which 49 teams participated by submitting videos of their AUVs as part of pre-qualification requirements. Of these, 25 teams made it into the event, which is lower than that in 2019. Some teams could not make it due to non-receipt of a travel-visa on time. Like the previous editions, we also had a student technical workshop on autonomous vehicles and sensing, and in addition, this time we also conducted an IEEE OES Distinguished lecture.
A highlight for this year was the endorsement from the UN Decade of Ocean sciences for the event. This underlined the importance and alignment of the event with the goals of this grand global movement, especially to 5 of its 10 challenges, and imprints IEEE OES’s important role in the Decade as well. Another unique feature of this edition was that it followed the AUV Symposium held earlier in the week. The idea was that teams from SAUVC could benefit from participation in the symposium, and interactions with some of the marine robotics experts who would stay back for the SAUVC event. This idea worked out well, and we had 2 student teams presenting papers in the AUV symposium, as well as several AUV symposium attendees staying on to witness the challenge and interact with the teams.
Team from the home ground (Singapore Polytechnic) and teams interacting with visitors (John Potter from NTNU)
Participating Teams
The 72 teams that registered for the event had to prequalify for participation. The teams were required to submit a video of their AUV swimming underwater for at least 10 seconds and demonstrate the usage of their AUV’s kill switch as part of the safety feature of their AUVs. Based on these criteria, 42 teams were selected to compete in the event. Of these, 25 teams made it to Singapore for the challenge. Student teams from more countries were expected to join as well, but many of the teams faced visa issues or funding issues, which stopped them from traveling to the event (notably, 9 teams from Bangladesh, Turkey, and Poland). Nevertheless, despite the travel, visa and funding issues faced in the post-covid era, it is impressive that so many teams made it and were able to participate. In total there were around 180 student participants at the event from 8 countries (India, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Russia, Taiwan, Hong Kong). The representation of teams from across Asia, particularly from South-Asia & South-East Asia was phenomenal and shows the value that SAUVC brings to this region. There were many first-timers and some regulars in the participating teams. This was the first time we saw participation of teams from Turkey, and one of them was from a high-school, which made their presence even more impressive. We also saw visits from alumni of previous teams (notably, the team from China, which won in previous editions of the competition).
The Challenge
SAUVC 2022 was similar in tasks to the previous edition, in that it consisted of two tiers – qualification round and final round. To qualify, the AUV had to swim from the qualification starting line and pass through the qualification gate without surfacing, touching the bottom/wall or the qualification gate. The top 16 qualified teams, with the fastest time for the qualifying round, were allowed to advance to the final round. In the final round, the AUV would accumulate points by completing a series of tasks aimed at testing its acoustic and visual navigation capabilities, positioning, actuation and robotic manipulation. The table below provides the different functional capabilities of the AUV being tested and the related tasks.
| No. | Task | Aspect of operation |
| 1. | Passing through a gate, avoiding red flare | Navigation, Obstacle avoidance |
| 2. | Locating a particular bucket amongst 4 options, and dropping a ball into it | Target acquisition and manipulation |
| 3. | Moving out of the bucket arena, returning and reacquiring the ball dropped. | Target reacquisition and manipulation |
| 4. | Bumping against a flare holding a ball to drop it (one with acoustic pinger, one without) | Acoustic/Visual Localisation |
| 5. | Resurfacing at the end of the run | Controls |
The introduction of the red flare in the first task, and the introduction of a decoy flare without an acoustic pinger in task number 4, were new additions in this year. This was to make sure the tasks were more challenging this year, thus progressively upgrading the challenge. Each task carried a certain number of points, depending on the challenge and the difficulty involved in performing it. There was also a timing bonus, and a bonus associated with weight and dimensions of the AUVs. Apart from this, the tasks were made more challenging through randomization of the position of the buckets, flare and gate and its orientation. A complete description of the tasks, static judging criteria and award of points are covered in the competition rule book available at https://sauvc.github.io/rulebook/.
SAUVC 2022 Award Winners
This year, the competition was wide open because the consistent champions from the last few editions, namely the team from Northwestern Polytechnical university (China) and Far Eastern Federal university (Russia) did not make it to the event, possibly due to Covid or visa-related issues. Instead, this time the winner was a debutant at SAUVC, namely the team from Turkey. The first runner-ups were the team from Bauman state Moscow technical university who were prize winners in 2019 as well, and the second runner-ups saw 2 teams from India and Indonesia (who have not won in previous editions). The top 4 teams in the finals were as follows:
- ITU AUV from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
- Team Hydronautics from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Russia
- BIT-AUV from Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, India, and Tech_SAS from Telkom University, Indonesia.
In addition to the top 4 finalists, we also awarded the IEEE OES “most innovative engineering” award, which was constituted in 2019. This was judged by a technical panel consisting of 5 members. Innovation was defined as anything that is new/different and intentionally implemented for a specific stated purpose in SAUVC, with practically shown application. Based on the above criteria, the team from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Russia, was awarded the OES “most innovative engineering” award.
Gala Dinner & Award Ceremony
The event ended with a gala dinner on the 26th where the prizes were announced. This event gives the teams a chance to have their fist-pumping moment and celebrate, as well as have a relaxed networking session where they can interact with each other, as well as the organizers who are also from the underwater engineering community themselves (spanning academia, industry and defense sectors). The ceremony was held at the School of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore. The spirited and exciting evening included a presentation of the participation certificates, as well as announcement of the winners. Some joyous moments and celebrations ensued, followed by long discussions that went well into the night.
Event publicity and social outreach
As in previous events, the event has been well covered on social media. The event was also publicized via the ECOP programme’s social media portal
(e.g..https://twitter.com/OceanDecadeECOP/status/1572871356840120320 and https://twitter.com/sauvcsg/status/1574211781722898432), and flyers of the ECOP programme and OES Earthzine were distributed at the event. The event will be reported in the ECOP programme’s newsletter as well, and in this sense, we established a good synergy between our event and the ECOP programme (ecopdecade.org/).
Specifically, our Twitter handle saw 81 tweets that made 11811 impressions over January to September. There were 6563 impressions in September alone, and 12800 profile visits. Instagram saw 5470 accounts reached in September alone, and 975 accounts who engaged with our profile. Facebook saw 7300 impressions in September alone, with 5200 engagements. The posts reached followers mainly from South Asia (Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India), Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong. This year, we decided not to award the “Most viewed photo social media” prize in order to focus our efforts towards technical achievements, and given that our social media handles already had good visibility.
Student AUV workshop
Following SAUVC 2022, a student workshop on autonomous vehicles and sensing technologies was organized on 26 March at the Singapore Polytechnic. The objective of the workshop was to complement the hands-on learning the students obtained during the competition, with talks and hands-on workshops on technologies related to marine robotics. Mentoring from expert student teams, and networking were the other objectives. This also goes hand-in-hand with outcomes #6 and #7, and challenges #9 and #10 of the UN Decade of Ocean Sciences, which has endorsed the SAUVC and the AMV workshop.
The chair of SAUVC 2022, Rajat Mishra, gave the welcome address followed by an introduction on IEEE OES membership by the OES Singapore Chapter chair. The workshop had 3 sessions covering 3 different aspects of marine vehicles, a precursor to introducing new tasks for future competitions and equip the participants with relevant knowledge:
- Improving on the vehicle’s capabilities by learning from successful teams on their approach towards robotics tasks such as vision, navigation, and sensing
- Taking the robot’s capability to the next level by introducing underwater communication into the picture
- Learning on large-scale monitoring applications using a larger-scale counterpart of autonomous robots – sailboats
Towards this, we had:
- A hands-on workshop on underwater communication, an important task that goes with marine robotics. The workshop was delivered by Manu Ignatius, CEO of Subnero, supported by Chinmay Pendharkar (CTO of Subnero). Teams were taught how to use basic tools and equipment for this, including via acoustics, optical methods and RF, using DIY sensor setups, cheap electronic equipment, and freely available software stacks such as UnetStack. Teams were shown an example of how they could use their laptop soundcard to transmit coded acoustic messages to other counterparts. The workshop was clearly very engaging, because pretty soon students were all sending acoustic messages to each other across the hall using these tools. The video of this workshop is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu5tRlNhxdY&list=PLIdhGHLNlpMGSwMsZZJNzwnGbNg5l04Wp&index=1
- A sharing-session by Bumblebee, a previous SAUVC team that has been successful in other competitions, to guide existing teams on what they could do. Bumblebee shared information on their lessons learnt on sensing, navigation, and control, and shared specifics of the approaches they used on their current version of the vehicle. After the talk, workshop attendees interacted with Bumblebee while they described their vehicle, which was on display at the workshop, learning about its key features. A video of this talk is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfundEfDwAQ&list=PLIdhGHLNlpMGSwMsZZJNzwnGbNg5l04Wp&index=4
- Talk on the use of sailboats as a research monitoring platform: Dr. John Potter (designation) from NTNU, delivered an IEEE OES Distinguished Lecture talk on how sailboats can be used as research monitoring platforms, filling in a niche gap between autonomous robots and expensive large research vessels. The talk also saw good engagement from the audience. A video of this talk is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrh0vaEOaik&list=PLIdhGHLNlpMGSwMsZZJNzwnGbNg5l04Wp&index=2
The workshop was attended by 130 students and 20 non-students. Following the talks, there was a networking lunch session.
It is also noteworthy that this year, SAUVC students benefited from the presence of experts from the marine robotics community who stayed on after the AUV Symposium. SAUVC student teams were also present at the AUV Symposium, presenting papers on how they designed their AUVs, and the various lessons they learnt from it. In this sense, we delivered a good synergy between the 3 events (AUV Symposium, Singapore AUV challenge, and the student workshop), benefiting the student community with a well-rounded learning experience.
Sponsorship
IEEE OES has always been a regular supporter of SAUVC in terms of sponsorship. Apart from OES, SAUVC 2022 was sponsored by Mathworks, Kongsberg, Evologics, BlueRobotics, SubCTech, Nortek, IEEE Young Professionals, National University of Singapore and Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG). Some of these sponsors had supported us towards the 2020 event, which did not materialize, and thus the sponsorship funds were carried over to the 2022 event. SAUVC is run solely on sponsorship, and we would like to sincerely thank all our sponsors for their support. Additionally, this year, Kongsberg helped us out with 5 of their representatives attending the event and helping with judging during the qualifiers. Representatives from Kongsberg and ONRG also interacted with the teams.
Sponsors
Concluding Remarks
SAUVC has been successfully organized for 8 consecutive editions now over 10 years. It is possibly the largest and most well represented autonomous underwater vehicle competition for students in Asia and Europe, and this year, the branding has taken one step forward with the endorsement from the Ocean Decade. Being an event that does not charge a blanket registration fee for teams to participate, it is impressive how much participation the event still garnered despite the post-Covid restrictions such as visa, travel and airline fees. Our no-registration policy is aimed at promoting fledgling teams to compete. IEEE OES membership drives were conducted as part of registration, as well as during the SAUVC workshop event. We believe the significant representation in terms of countries, number of students and diversity, is encouraging. We also have significant educational outreach – the teams benefit not only from the hands-on competition, but also from interactions with committee members and attending marine robotics experts who give them mentoring and advice. Furthermore, the student workshop on autonomous robotics and sensing, completes their learning cycle. This time as well, we saw teams helping each other out in achieving tasks such as acoustics, and we hope this collaborative nature and spirit of the challenge continues in future editions.
Video highlights of the first 3 days of the event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQs1-rJd8Ao Day 1 (registration and setup)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS-W7J8bLH8 Day 2 (qualifiers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb71p32hGsA Day 3 (finals)
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.