MRI: Development of an Innovative Underwater Robot Testing Facility for the Kilo Nalu Natural Coastal Marine Observatory

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award supports the development of a state-of-the-art underwater robotics testing instrument in a natural coastal environment. Robotic systems are often developed in laboratory settings, where complicating factors can be controlled or removed entirely. When those robots are eventually utilized in a real-world setting, they must be optimized to interact with those unpredictable complications.

This is especially true for marine robots which are heavily influenced by waves and currents in the ocean environment. This instrument will allow designers to accurately track and maintain communication with underwater robots while they troubleshoot performance issues in authentic surroundings. Having such an instrument available for public academic use at the Kilo Nalu Observatory off the coast of O’ahu will accelerate marine robot research.

More capable marine robots will in turn lead to improvements in oceanographic and climate modeling, enable more informative early warning systems, and enhance the resilience of coastal and island communities. This robotic test basin will also serve as a natural classroom, teaching students both about underwater vehicle operations and mission planning and about the fundamentals of robotics in general.

This educational objective is especially important to the University of Hawai’i, a minority serving institution, thus providing education and training opportunities to multiple underrepresented groups in STEM fields.

The facility being created through this award is intended to provide a necessary intermediary environment between laboratory feasibility studies and full-scale oceanic implementation of marine robots. The Kilo Nalu Observatory is a permanent cabled observatory off the coast of Oahu that provides persistent power and high-speed data transfer to a number of oceanographic sensors installed in a modular fashion.

The robot testing instrument will be built on this infrastructure. The requested hardware includes a set of acoustic modems, a high-accuracy acoustic localization system, and an expandable general-purpose autonomous underwater vehicle, to serve as a mobile robot testing and training platform. Together with the existing hardware, the natural laboratory will have underwater communication, tracking, docking, and charging capabilities in order to perform sophisticated field testing and training of novel vehicle subsystems, navigation and control algorithms, cooperative control methodologies, and will serve as a home base for resident underwater robots.

The facility will leverage the existing University of Hawai’i underwater observatory infrastructure to reduce the time and costs required for deployment, operation, and maintenance.

This project is jointly funded by the division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI), the Major Instrumentation Research Program (MRI), and the National Robotics Initiative (NRI).

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.