Towards mobile underwater robots at the centimeter scale
Underwater robots are indispensable for many aquatic tasks including exploration, infrastructure inspection, and environmental monitoring. However, the underwater environment remains a challenging medium for robotic development. Most systems tend to be large and complex, making them unsuitable for confined spaces like shipwrecks and caves as well as prohibitively expensive to build and deploy. There is a growing need for smaller, lower-cost underwater robots to address these challenges. There is also a growing interest in the coordination of underwater robotic swarms at this scale to unlock entirely new capabilities. This work will discuss the mechanical and computational challenges for developing these systems, and present research being conducted at MIT’s Distributed Robotics Lab.
Pascal Spino is a third year PhD candidate in the Mechanical Engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He works with Daniela Rus within MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and his work focusses on distributed robotic systems. Pascal completed his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in computer science at Washington State University in 2021. He is the recipient of MIT’s School of Engineering Distinguished Graduate Fellowship.