Marine Robotics & Sensor Development
The University of Edinburgh is at the forefront of bridging the gap between oceanography and robotics.
In recent years, the gap between robotics and observational oceanography technology has grown to be striking and now it calls for an effort to bring these two disciplines closer. As many aspects of science are becoming more and more interdisciplinary, so are oceanography and robotics.
Merging ocean robotics and ocean observation:
The ORCA Hub
The award-winning project, ORCA Hub creates an excellent opportunity to blend the latest development of offshore robotics and ocean observation. The main aim of ORCA is to improve the safety record of offshore platforms and to enable the remote monitoring and management of remote ocean assets. For oceanographers, ORCA’s target translates into a completely new set of data and devices capable of transmitting in real time, not only the status of an asset, but also of its surrounding ocean.
Moreover, the Soft System Group has been focussing on a portable bioinspired multisensing platform, called the Limpet. The Limpet can be deployed on offshore structures and it is capable of communicating in real time the gathered data or the result of pre-programmed on board analysis (edge processing) to communicate anomalies in historical datasets. In the last year, the Soft System Group studied how the Limpet can measure turbidity levels, and have created a server hub to safely communicate industrial data, a real time visualisation interface and a simplified natural language query system.
State-of-the-art testing facilities:
In collaboration with the FloWave, our researchers are investigating how the deterministic forecast of surface waves can improve the manoeuvrability of underwater robots, thus pushing the boundary of ocean observations into the harshest underwater environments.
Given the bio-inspirational nature of our work and our interest in soft robotics we are now investigating how to employ highly biodegradable materials in soft robots manufacturing to ensure that the oceanic robots growth will be mindful of the environment.