Understanding the motion behaviors of sharks, turtles and other marine life is essential for maintaining our natural coastal resources. Over the past decades, technology for tracking such marine life has matured to the point where fish and sharks can be tracked for months to years and their geo-positions resolved with meter level accuracy. To accomplish such tracking for aquatic species, sharks and other fish are often tagged with acoustic transmitters that can be tracked with a group of receivers placed in coastal environments. More recently, these acoustic receivers have been attached to Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), underwater robots that can be programmed to autonomously follow the marine animal being tracked, while simultaneously measuring oceanographic conditions surrounding the animal of interest. This IRES Track I award supports 18 U.S. students from Harvey Mudd College and California State University Long Beach to participate in research to extend the development of AUV technology, and apply it to a marine life monitoring study. Students will contribute to the active tracking of nurse sharks and sea turtles within their habitat located in Bahia Santa Elena, Costa Rica. This location is ideal to not only test and develop robotics technology that is required for such sampling, but also to produce new data regarding the motion behaviors of these relevant species within complex coastal habitats. The contributions of this work includes development of new robot tracking technology that can be applied to other applications like marine public safety surveillance, new data that will increase our understanding of how sharks and sea turtles migrate along the coast, and training a diverse group of U.S. students for research and cross-cultural collaboration. A benefit of this work is that the students involved gain extensive professional training in topics outside their field of study, but still highly relevant for research progress. These activities include opportunities for high engagement with several members of the local community including NGO leaders, school children, fishers, and researchers from Costa Rica. The specific contributions of this work are highly interdisciplinary and include 1) shark and turtle habitat mapping, 2) multi-AUV-single-transceiver system development, 3) novel acoustic tag development, and 4) nurse shark and sea turtle tracking experiments in Costa Rica. To facilitate this research, the PIs are running a 3-year cohort-based program, with each cohort consisting of 3 Harvey Mudd College engineering/cs students, 3 CSU Long Beach biology students, and 3 University of Costa Rica biology students. Each summer a new cohort of HMC and CSULB students travels to Costa Rica for up to 6 weeks to work with hosts Dr. Mario Espinoza and Maike Heidemeyer, as well as their students from UCR. The cohort is trained in both robotics and the culture of the host country. Unique to the program associated with this award is 1) a focus on training LatinX students, and 2) leveraging interdisciplinary aspects of the students' academic backgrouds in the cohorts.
The intellectual merit of this research includes contributions to both underwater robotics and marine biology. The development of a multi-AUV system that uses single hydrophone receivers for active tracking of marine life itself generates new objective function formulations, new algorithms to optimize such objective functions, new approaches to decentralize the algorithms across multiple AUVs, and new methods of systems integration. With respect to contributions this makes to marine biology: the fine scale movement patterns of both the nurse sharks and sea turtles have been largely unknown. Also, their habitats have never been mapped, as the nation of Costa Rica has less access to some of this technology. Combining these two new data sets, motion patterns and habitat maps, helps answer some of the most basic but unanswered questions regarding how these species use their habitats.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
