Kanna Rajan

RAND Corporation | RAND · Engineering and Applied Sciences

The study of dynamic features of the ocean, in which complex physical, chemical, and biological interactions evolve on multiple time scales, poses significant sampling challenges because the required spatial and temporal resolutions are not possible by ship or satellite studies alone. Satellite remote sensing captures only surface effects while exp...

The oceans make this planet habitable and provide a variety of essential ecosystem services ranging from climate regulation through control of greenhouse gases to provisioning about 17% of protein consumed by humans. The oceans are changing as a consequence of human activity but this system is severely under sampled. Traditional methods of studying...

Study of ocean processes is important to understanding climatic variability especially on the productive upper water-column. Ocean currents regulate the climate, it captures CO\(_2\) from the atmosphere and oxygen is generated by its plankton communities, all of which are part of the global environmental cycle which are being impacted by anthropoge...

Study of ocean processes is important to understanding climatic variability especially on the productive upper water-column. Ocean currents regulate the climate, it captures CO2 from the atmosphere and oxygen is generated by its plankton communities, all of which are part of the global environmental cycle which are being impacted by anthropogenic c...

Improving and optimizing oceanographic sampling is a crucial task for marine science and maritime resource management. Faced with limited resources in understanding processes in the water-column, the combination of statistics and autonomous systems provide new opportunities for experimental design. In this work we develop efficient spatial sampling...

Finding high-value locations for in situ data collection is of substantial importance in ocean science, where diverse bio-physical processes interact to create dynamically evolving phenomena. These cover a variable spatial extent, and are sparse and difficult to predict. Autonomous robotic platforms can sustain themselves in harsh conditions with p...

Our research concerns the coordination and control of robotic vehicles for upper water-column oceanographic observations. In such an environment, operating multiple vehicles to observe dynamic oceanographic phenomena, such as ocean processes and marine life, from fronts to cetaceans, has required that we design, implement and operate software, meth...

This paper presents a report from a cruise onboard the R/V Falkor oceanographic vessel from the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The goal of this cruise was to demonstrate a novel approach to observe the ocean with multiple underwater, surface, and aerial vehicles, as well with the R/V Falkor also used as the base and control center for all assets. We desc...

Currents, wind, bathymetry, and freshwater runoff are some of the factors that make coastal waters heterogeneous, patchy, and scientifically interesting—where it is challenging to resolve the spatiotemporal variation within the water column. We present methods and results from field experiments using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with embe...

Efficient sampling of coastal ocean processes, especially mechanisms such as upwelling and internal waves and their influence on primary production, is critical for understanding our changing oceans. Coupling robotic sampling with ocean models provides an effective approach to adaptively sample such features. We present methods that capitalize on i...

This paper presents methods for building and exploiting compact spatial models on board an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) towards tracking suspended material plumes. The research is aiming to improve real-time monitoring of dispersal dynamics connected to marine industries such as oil and mine tailing. By exploiting in-situ information from se...

Our research concerns the mixed-initiative coordination of air and underwater vehicles interacting over inter-operated radio and underwater communication networks for novel oceanographic field studies. In such an environment, operating multiple vehicles to observe dynamic oceanographic events such as fronts, plumes, blooms and cetaceans has require...

The early promise of the impact of machine intelligence did not involve the partitioning of the nascent field of Artificial Intelligence. The founders of AI envisioned the notion of embedded intelligence as being conjoined between perception, reasoning and actuation. Yet over the years the fields of AI and Robotics drifted apart. Practitioners of A...

The recent explosive growth of small satellite operations driven primarily from an academic or pedagogical need, has demonstrated the viability of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies in space. They have also leveraged and shown the need for development of compatible sensors primarily aimed for Earth observation tasks including monitoring terrestr...

Our research concerns the mixed-initiative coordination of air and underwater vehicles interacting over inter-operated radio and underwater communication networks for novel oceanographic field studies. In such an environment, operating multiple vehicles to observe dynamic oceanographic events such as fronts, plumes, blooms and cetaceans has require...

Over the last decade, ocean sunfish movements have been monitored worldwide using various satellite tracking methods. This study reports the near-real time monitoring of fine-scale (< 10 m) behaviour of sunfish. The study was conducted in southern Portugal in May 2014 and involved satellite tags and underwater and surface robotic vehicles to measur...

Northward (left) and Eastward (right) daily component provided by the Wave Glider (line) and model output (dots) averaged over two days and registered at 18 m depth. (TIF)

a) Example of a drifter (red line, with dates) and particles (blue lines) tracks, b) Atlantic section of the drifter track before entering the Mediterranean Sea (red line) and mean trajectory of the 200 particles released in the Lagrangian model (green line). (TIF)

Supplementary Material for integrated monitoring of Mola mola behaviour in space and time. (DOCX)

Example of a drifter track superimposed on a MODIS SST map composite from May 25th to June 1th (top) and June 2th to 9th June (bottom), both 2014. (TIF)

Archive of Drifter data. (ZIP)

Archive of AUV tracks data. (ZIP)

Supervision and control of Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has traditionally been focused on an operator determining a priori the sequence of waypoints of a single vehicle for a mission. As AUVs become more ubiquitous as a scientific tool, we envision the need for controlling multiple vehicles which would impose less cognitive burden on the o...

Robotic sampling is attractive in many field robotics applications that require persistent collection of physical samples for ex-situ analysis. Examples abound in the earth sciences in studies involving the collection of rock, soil, and water samples for laboratory analysis. In our test domain, marine ecosystem monitoring, detailed understanding of...

This paper describes a command and control infrastructure that provides mixed-initiative user interfaces for the coordination and control of networked vehicle systems composed by heterogeneous robots, satellite trackers, manned ships and communication gateways. The presented infrastructure was tested in a field experiment for tracking and sampling...

Obtaining synoptic observations of dynamic ocean phenomena such as fronts, eddies, oxygen minimum zones and blooms has been challenging primarily due to the large spatial scales involved. Traditional methods of observation with manned ships are expensive and unless the vessel can survey at high-speed, is unrealistic. Autonomous underwater vehicles...

In this paper we consider the problem of tracing the structure of oceanographic features using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). Solving this problem requires the construction of a control strategy that will determine the actions for the AUV based on the current state, as measured by on-board sensors and the historic trajectory (including sens...

Ocean fronts are productivity hot spots, supportingmarine life from plankton towhales. These dynamic systems contain a vast amount of information, and have the potential to significantly expand our knowledge of aquatic ecosystems in relation to climate change. However, ocean fronts and other dynamic features cannot be studied through conventional o...

Robotic vehicles have become a critical tool for studying the under-sampled coastal ocean. This has led to new paradigms in scientific discovery. The combination of agility, reactivity, and persistent presence makes autonomous robots ideal for targeted sampling of elusive, episodic events such as algal blooms. In order to achieve this goal, they ne...

This paper describes scientific and engineering efforts towards remote sensing, tagging and continuous tracking of sunfish specimens (Mola mola, world largest bony fish) in the open sea. This ongoing experiment is done in the context of a collaboration between MBARI and Porto University and bridges biology, fisheries research, autonomy and control...

Marine phenomena such as algal blooms can be detected using in situ measurements onboard autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), but understanding plankton ecology and community structure requires retrieval and analysis of water specimens. This process requires shipboard or manual sample collection, followed by onshore lab analysis which is time-con...

We have designed, built, tested and fielded a decision support system which provides a platform for situational awareness, planning, observation, archiving and data analysis. While still in development, our inter-disciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, biologists and oceanographers has made extensive use of our system in at-sea experim...

Coastal marine ecosystems are profoundly influenced by processes that originate from their boundaries. These include fluid boundaries — with the atmosphere, oceanic boundary currents and terrestrial aquatic systems, as well as solid boundaries — with the seafloor and coast. Phytoplankton populations transfer complexly interacting boundary influence...

Robotic plan execution has traditionally assumed that goals are articulated prior to mission execution. As robots have become persistent and increasingly moved into real-world environments, this assumption is not necessarily true; for instance a user can decide to give a new objective to the robot for inclusion in the plan being formulated, add new...

Introduction to Autonomy for Marine Robots.- Autonomy for Unmanned Marine Vehicles with MOOS-IvP.- Towards Deliberative Control in Marine Robotics.- Path Planning for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles.- An Ontology Based Approach to Fault Tolerant Mission Execution for Autonomous Platforms.- Cooperation Between Underwater Vehicles.- Behaviour Adaptati...

Global initiatives are underway to establish Ocean Observing Systems (OOS) that can provide society better information on ocean conditions. These observatories include moorings, drifters, floats, and buoyancy gliders. Although gliders have long operational endurance, their reliance on batteries limits sensors payloads, thus some OOS also include au...

Fronts have been recognized as hotspots of intense biological activity and are important targets for observation to understand coastal ecology and transport in a changing ocean. With high spatial and temporal variability, detection and event response for frontal zones is challenging for robotic platforms like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)....

We extend existing oceanographic sampling methodologies to sample an advecting feature of interest using autonomous robotic platforms. GPS-tracked Lagrangian drifters are used to tag and track a water patch of interest with position updates provided periodically to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for surveys around the drifter as it moves wi...

An experiment with different AUVs was carried out in the Mar Menor Coastal Lagoon from October 31 to November 5 in order to measure and assess the influence of the water from the Mar Menor on the adjacent area of the Mediterranean. This was carried out as a result of the meeting held between several institutions from the Iberian Peninsula and EEUU...

The coastal ocean is a dynamic and complex environment due to the confluence of atmospheric, oceanographic, estuarine/riverine, and land–sea interactions. Yet it continues to be undersampled, resulting in poor understanding of dynamic, episodic, and complex phenomena such as harmful algal blooms, anoxic zones, coastal plumes, thin layers, and front...

We describe the process of improving the onboard autonomy of LAUV-Seacon AUVs with an in-situ planning agent. Deliberative planning is achieved by extending the existing control architecture with T-REX and a domain model description which is specific to the Seacon AUVs and typical mission scenarios. We discuss the required architectural changes as...

In the coastal ocean, biological and physical dynamics vary on spatiotemporal scales spanning many orders of magnitude. At large spatial (O(100km)) and temporal (O(weeks to months)) scales, traditional shipboard and moored measurements are very effective at quantifying mean and varying oceanic properties. At scales smaller than the internal Rossby...

In this chapter Teleo-Reactive Executive (T-REX) is designed, developed, tested and deployed as an onboard adaptive control system that integrates artificial intelligence (AI)-based planning and probabilistic state estimation in a hybrid executive. Probabilistic state estimation integrates a number of science observations to produce a likelihood th...

Thom Maughan, Jnaneshwar Das, Mike McCann, Danelle Cline, Mike Godin, Fred Bahr, Kevin Gomes, Tom O'Reilly, Frederic Py, Monique Messie, John Ryan, Francisco Chavez, Jim Bellingham, Maria Fox, Kanna Rajan Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Moss Lading, California, United States Many of the coastal ocean processes we wish to observe in order t...

With the advent of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and other mobile platforms, marine robotics have had substantial impact on the oceanographic sciences. These systems have allowed scientists to collect data over temporal and spatial scales that would be logistically impossible or prohibitively expensive using traditional ship-based measureme...

Given the diversity and spatio-temporal scales of dynamic coastal processes, sampling is a challenging task for oceanog- raphers. To meet this challenge new robotic platforms such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) are being increas- ingly used. For effective water sampling during a mission an AUV should be adaptive to its environment, which re...

The Goal-Oriented Autonomous Controller (GOAC) is the envisaged result of a multi-institutional effort within the on-going Autonomous Controller R&D activ-ity funded by ESA ESTEC. The objective of this effort is to design, build and test a viable on-board controller to demonstrate key concepts in fully autonomous opera-tions for ESA missions. This...

We present AUV survey methodologies to track and sample an advecting patch of water. Current AUV-based sampling rely primarily on geographic waypoint track-line surveys that are suitable for static or slowly changing features. When studying dynamic, rapidly evolving oceanographic features, such methods at best introduce error through insufficient s...

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are commonly used for carrying out pre-planned oceanographic surveys, but there is increasing interest in optimizing these surveys by performing onboard re- planning. MBARI has developed an advanced AUV control system, the Teleo Reactive Executive (T-REX) that enables the vehicle to survey areas in more detail...

Predicting when and where key oceanic processes will be encountered is problematic in dynamic coastal waters where diverse physical, chemical, and biological factors interact in varied and rapidly changing combinations. Defining key processes often requires efficient sampling of specific water masses and prompt sample return for subsequent analyses...

This paper presents an oceanographic toolchain that can be used to generate multi-vehicle robotic surveys for large-scale dynamic features in the coastal ocean. Our science application targets Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) which have significant societal impact to coastal communities yet are poorly understood ecologically. Bloom patches can be large...

The software, called the Teleo-Reactive Executive (T-REX), is built around the paradigm of sense-plan-act and is deployed on MBARI's Dorado AUV. The vehicle uses its instruments to sense the environment, generates a plan or course of action for the future by deliberating about the best way to accomplish desired goals and then acts on or executes th...

We present a formal framework of an autonomous agent as a collection of coordinated control loops, with a recurring sense, plan, act cycle. Our framework manages the informa- tion ow within the partitioned structure to ensure consis- tency in order to direct the ow of goals and observations in a timely manner. The resulting control structure improv...