Gabriele Ferri1, Alessandro Faggiani2, Tommaso Fabbri2, and Fausto Ferreira3
1RAMI 2022 Technical Director 2RAMI2022 Deputy Technical Director 3RAMI 2022 Head Judge, VP 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 the use of heterogeneous robots in our competitions. In SAUC-E we have given teams the possibility to deploy also marine surface vehicles, introducing tasks that required robot cooperation. In fact, only teams composed of cooperative heterogeneous robots can be effective in solving complex tasks in real world scenarios. This interest led CMRE to locally organise the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge at Tor del Sale power plant site (Piombino, Italy) in September 2015. 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. 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.
For 2022, we have started 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 competition has events for aerial robots, organised by CATEC (Spain), and for underwater vehicles organised by CMRE. RAMI 2022 is the first RAMI event which we have conducted at La Spezia in July 2022.
The competition
CMRE hosted this year the RAMI 2022 robotics competition from 10 to 15 July after a two year interruption due to COVID-19 pandemic. The competition took place in CMRE water 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 also proposed tasks similar to those present in ERL Emergency 2019.
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 of 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 added: staying into contact with the pipe, valve closing and picking up 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.
Nonetheless, several teams were able to tackle the tasks, achieving many goals. Out of the 4 marine teams registered, all tested their vehicles in the water. We tried to provide the teams as much time as possible to test their robots in the water basin. Only testing the robots in the water can allow teams to solve the technical issues and to prepare the robots for the proposed tasks. To support the practice at sea, a test arena containing the objects to be detected and one manipulation console was also prepared next to the competition area. This allowed the teams to collect data, for instance to acquire images of the colored buoys to train and test their classifiers.
We have noticed with pleasure that, despite the COVID-19, teams performance generally has grown over the past years. We have seen significant and steady progress in several teams and a constant look for improvement. The two top teams had accomplished several tasks, mainly in navigation, survey and manipulation. The rookie team managed to score some points as well. A fourth team had a significant hardware issue during the week that prevented full runs in the competition arena.
Figure 1 The new vehicle developed by AUV Team TomKyle..
Figure 2 (Left) Tomkyle detection and classification of a red buoy. (Right) An image of the manipulation console with a number to be recognised. The valve and the stick to be grabbed are visible.
The participant teams
This year 4 teams (of which one joint team by two universities) participated. Although initially more teams expressed their interest (including teams from the U.S.), uncertainty regarding COVID-19 travel restrictions made some teams cancel their participation. It is to be noted that after 2 years without competitions, 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, to support team participation and the succession with the required handover of experience. To start after the COVID-19 period, we think it is pivotal to involve people, to strengthen the community, contacting possible participants and sponsors. This year, we had the participation of two teams that had attended many of our past events. One team participated again in our events, after ERL17. A new team was also present. This was possible through a joint international venture, between two universities. This followed previous collaborations the two institutions had in the framework of the EUMarineRobots project, an EU-funded project aiming to make marine robotics infrastructures available to researchers for some specific projects. That team was mentored by a previous participant in SAUC-E 2012, which shows the virtuous circle of students participating in our events thatlater find a job in marine robotics and then become mentors. Of the competing teams, three had previously participated in our competitions, showing how ERL/SAUC-E is today a fixed appointment for several European research groups.
The participant teams were:
- AUV Team TomKyle; from the University of Applied Sciences of Kiel, Germany. This team has participated since 2014 in our competitions yearly.
- UNIFI Team; from the University of Florence, Italy. A veteran of our competitions (first participation in 2012).
- 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. This year, they participated with a robot they built.
- Black Pearl; from the University of Pisa (Italy) and Jacobs University (Germany). This team participated for the first time and included graduate students from Italy and undergraduate students from Germany.
The winners
RAMI 2022 was a hard-fought competition for the three days dedicated to three different Task Benchmarks (TBMs): Pipeline area inspection on Wednesday, Intervention on the pipeline structure on Thursrday and finally the Complete mission at the plant on Friday. AUV Team TomKyle and UNIFI Robotics Team challenged in the three TBMs, each one winning one TBM and having a draw in the Intervention on the pipeline. AUV Team Tomkyle was finally awarded with the first RAMI 2022 award, by evaluating the results in the three TBMs and considering the results in the presentation the teams gave to the judges about their robots.
The winners of the RAMI 2022 were:
- 1st Place – AUV Team TomKyle.
- 2nd Place – UNIFI Robotics Team
- 3rd Place – Black Pearl.
Other prizes awarded were:
- “Best Rookie Award” – Black Pearl.
- “Persistency Award” – OUBOT.
- “Best Presentation” – AUV Team TomKyle
Figure 3 Teams with their awards.
Figure 4 The winners with Gabriele Ferri.
Feedback
The feedback from both the participants and the judges was very positive. Teams reported good results in tasks, which are becoming harder and harder every year in order to support the gradual growth of participant teams and to push in some cases the state of the art. At the same time, it is felt the need to keep or create some simple tasks for the newcomers. We will try to achieve this trade-off in the future, to be attractive both for new entries, and for more experienced teams, which require more challenging tasks for developing and testing their capabilities. The realistic scenario, which attract participants, is also central to involve end-users and companies. This year, for instance, we had one judge from SAIPEM and one from ROSEN group. Following previous feedback, during the assessment of team performance, more points were awarded to achievements involving autonomy. This is thought to push teams to focus on autonomy and advanced perception. Results of RAMI 2022 showed good performance for autonomous navigation, mapping, imaging and tele-operated manipulation, while further work is needed for real-time perception and autonomy. This will be addressed in next year’s competition. Furthermore, to develop teams’ perception skills and algorithms, a virtual RAMI challenge is ongoing. In the virtual challenge we provide teams with an underwater image dataset for developing image processing software. This is also important since in the underwater domain there is lack of available datasets for developing and validating new image processing algorithms
The judges
This year we had a large pool of judges and visitors coming from all over Europe and the U.S. We are pleased to thank IEEE OES, Italian Army, Italian Navy, SAIPEM (Italy), ROSEN Group (Germany), Robonation (U.S.), Office of Naval Research (ONR) (U.S.) and the H2O Robotics (Croatia) who provided exceptionally qualified judges, increasing the quality of the competition. Dr. Fausto Ferreira (University of Zagreb, Croatia), the OES VP for Workshops & Symposia, was the Head Judge and visited us in the framework of the IEEE OES committee Marine Autonomous Systems Competitions Coordination (MASC2), working globally to standardise student marine robotics.
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. One of the RAMI goals is to educate future multi-disciplinary engineers. Therefore, the sponsorship of ‘Breaking the Surface’ 2022, the 14th Interdisciplinary Field Workshop of Marine Robotics and Applications, is well aligned with our mission. The organisers of ‘Breaking the Surface’ provided 1 complimentary registration to the best rookie team, 1 to the best team and 1 to the second best. These students will have the opportunity to participate in the 14th edition of this multi-disciplinary and educational workshop that, since 2019, counts with the IEEE OES sponsorship.
As in the past, we had again the marine robotics commercial sector involved. Blue Robotics gave a Ping echosounder to the team that won the Persistency award.
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 2022 such 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.