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Telesupervised Adaptive Ocean Sensor Fleet (TAOSF)
Head: John Dolan
Contact: Gregg Podnar (gwp@cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Associated lab/group: Tele-Supervised Autonomous Robotics

For more information, see this project's homepage.

Global ecosystems are changing as evidenced by increased frequency and severity of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in U.S. coastal environments and worldwide. Under certain conditions, fast-growing species of unicellular algae (a phytoplankton) rapidly form high-density blooms.

The harmful or toxic species can cause mass mortalities of marine organisms, disrupt ecosystem dynamics, and also cause a variety of human and animal illnesses. Other significant economic losses occur due to aquaculture business, fisheries, and tourism.

Scientific HAB studies have relied on collecting discrete water samples from hard-to-schedule, expensive research ships. Other studies use anchored or drifting sensor buoys which cannot be repositioned, do not enter coastal areas where HABs cause the greatest damage, and have limited operational lives. We are developing a HAB Investigation Telesupervised Adaptive Sensor System (HABITASS) to address these limitations.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is expanding an existing Ocean Atmosphere Sensor Integration System (OASIS) fleet that performs in-situ air and ocean surface observations. By extending the capabilities of OASIS to include a telesupervision software architecture, adaptive autonomous fleet control, and HAB-specific sensors, HABITASS will provide:

• Dynamic taskability and adaptation
• Greater insensitivity to weather than satellite systems
• Greater access to coastal waters than buoys
• Centralized analysis of collected data
• Real-time observation by remote oceanographers

Each platform is tasked from and communicates its data back to the Tele-Science Workstation.

By supporting oceanographers with multi-robot control software and automated science data analysis, this work will form a critical segment of the ocean portion of the Earth Science Sensor Web concept, supporting the prediction of outbreaks of HABs several days in advance of their occurrence, and providing more detailed information about the severity and the duration of any given outbreak.

This work is supported by a grant for Advanced Information Systems Technology from NASA's Earth Science Technology Office.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• Christopher Baker - PhD Student, RI <tallbaker@cmu.edu>
• [Home] John Dolan - Senior Systems Scientist <jmd@cs.cmu.edu>
• Alberto Elfes - Principal Member of Technical Staff, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• [Home] Alan D. Guisewite - Webmaster/Special Proj Asst <adg@cmu.edu>
• Jeff Hosler - Software R&D Manager, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Bryan Low - PhD Student, ECE <klow@andrew.cmu.edu>
• John Moisan - Oceanographer, NASA GSFC Wallops Flight Facility
• Tiffany Moisan - Research Scientist, NASA GSFC Wallops Flight Facility
• [Home] Gregg Podnar - Program Manager <gwp@cmu.edu>
• Ellie Lin Ratliff - PhD Student, RI <elliel@andrew.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Stephen B Stancliff - Research Programmer <stancliff@cmu.edu>

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Multi-Level Autonomy Robot Telesupervision
  G. Podnar, J. Dolan, A. Elfes, and M. Bergerman
  Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '08), May, 2008. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [6410 KB] copyrighted

• Operation of Robotic Science Boats Using the Telesupervised Adaptive Ocean Sensor Fleet System
  G. Podnar, J. Dolan, and A. Elfes
  Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '08), May, 2008. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [9340 KB] copyrighted

• Human Telesupervision of Very Heterogeneous Planetary Robot Teams
  G. Podnar, J. Dolan, A. Elfes, and M. Bergerman
  Proceedings of the 45th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting (AIAA 2007), September, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [7699 KB] copyrighted

• The Telesupervised Adaptive Ocean Sensor Fleet
  A. Elfes, G. Podnar, J. Dolan, S.B. Stancliff, E.L. Ratliff, J. Hosler, T. Ames, J. Moisan, T. Moisan, J. Higinbotham, and E. Kulczycki
  Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Atmospheric and Environmental Remote Sensing Data Processing and Utilization III: Readiness for GEOSS, August, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [703 KB] copyrighted

• Scheduling for Humans and Team Size Issues in Multirobot Supervisory Control
  S. Mau
  master's thesis, tech. report CMU-RI-TR-07-20, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, June, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [2366 KB] copyrighted

• Harmful Algal Bloom Characterization Via the Telesupervised Adaptive Ocean Sensor Fleet
  J. Dolan, G. Podnar, S.B. Stancliff, E.L. Ratliff, J. Higinbotham, J. Hosler, T. Ames, J. Moisan, T. Moisan, and A. Elfes
  Proc. NASA Science Technology Conference 2007 (NSTC-07), May, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [503 KB] copyrighted

• Adaptive Sampling for Multi-Robot Wide-Area Exploration
  K.H. Low, G. Gordon, J. Dolan, and P. Khosla
  Proceedings of the IEEE 2007 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '07), April, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [122 KB] copyrighted