Environmental Impacts: Materials Research to Improve the Performance of Sensors used in Automated Animal Classification

Led by: Bing Ouyang, Ph.D.
Affiliated Home Campus: Harbor Branch
Affiliated Department: Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute

PROJECT

The overarching goal of the proposed work is to develop transformative techniques for ocean current turbine (OCT) inspection, animal monitoring and animal classification near the OCT site.

The FAU/HBOI Systems and Imaging Lab (SAIL) is investigating novel systems and sensors that can be employed to support such monitoring tasks. Some critical requirements for these systems include persistency (i.e., can monitor a site for long duration), mobility (can cover a large swath of water), and robustness (can operate under all weather conditions). Under the supervision of FAU Harbor Branch faculty, the student will investigate tethered drone-based sensing platform that can be operated from a boat to fulfill such requirements. The outcome of this project will be a prototype that can be the foundation for future endeavors to integrate unmanned surface vehicles with tethered drones to support monitoring in a non-ideal OCT monitoring environment.