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Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar’s (CMU-Q) Associate Teaching Professor Gianni Di Caro is using artificial intelligence and a fleet of autonomous marine robots to better explore the marine environment around Qatar.
To better understand marine environments, researchers create information maps of data such as depth, water quality and salinity. This information is critical for a country like Qatar, which balances offshore oil and gas operations with the preservation and sustainability of a fragile marine ecosystem.
Typically, information maps are created by a manually operated boat sampling data at pre-defined points, one at-a-time and sharing that information every a few months. Di Caro said this method has serious drawbacks, including the fact that sampling is sequential and static. It also doesn’t adaptively select where to sample based on gathered evidence, since data processing is done offline.