Robot Sensor Boat

Associated Lab: Tele-Supervised Autonomous Robotics (T-SAR)
This Project is no longer active.

We present a fleet of autonomous Robot Sensor Boats (RSBs) developed for lake and river fresh water quality assessment and controlled by our Multilevel Autonomy Robot Telesupervision Architecture (MARTA).

The RSBs are low cost, highly maneuverable, shallow draft sensor boats, developed as part of the Sensor Web program supported under the Advanced Information Systems Technology program of NASA’s Earth Systems Technology Office. They can scan large areas of lakes, and navigate up tributaries to measure water quality near outfalls that larger research vessels cannot reach.

The MARTA telesupervision architecture has been applied to a number of domains from multi-platform autonomous wide area planetary mineral prospecting, to multi-platform ocean monitoring.

The RSBs are a complementary expansion of a fleet of NOAA/NASA-developed extended-deployment surface autonomous vehicles that enable in-situ study of meteorological factors of the ocean/atmosphere interface, and which have been adapted to investigate harmful algal blooms under this program.

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