LCSR Seminar: Joshua Mangelson

Description

Joshua Mangelson, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Brigham Young University, will give a talk titled "Steps Toward Intelligent Autonomous Underwater Inspection and Data Collection" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

This is a hybrid event; to attend virtually, the Zoom link is available online.

Abstract:

Over 70% of our world is underwater, but less than 1% of the world's oceans have been mapped at resolutions greater than 100 m per pixel. Regular inspection, mapping, and data collection in marine environments is essential for a whole host of reasons including gaining a scientific understanding of our planet, civil infrastructure maintenance, and safe navigation. However, manual inspection/data collection using divers is expensive, dangerous, time-consuming, and tedious work.

In this talk, I will discuss the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) to automatically and intelligently map, inspect, and collect information in unstructured marine environments. In particular, we will discuss the problems present in this space as well as the contributions my lab is making toward addressing these problems, including 1) the development of a general-purpose marine robotics testbed at BYU, 2) the development of a marine robotics simulator called HoloOcean, 3) advancements in marine robotic localization using Lie groups, and 4) preliminary results toward expert-guided topic modeling and intelligent data collection.