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| Advancements in Underwater Vehicles: Responding to Current Environmental Issues |
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SPEAKER:
James Morash
Research Engineer, MIT Seagrant Program
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ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Even if humans could breathe under water like fish, we might not want to become permanently aquatic. “Believe it or not,” says James Morash , “the deep ocean is kind of boring,” covered as it is by so much sandy sea floor. And yet there’s much to be learned about this terrain, which was a mystery to humans up ‘til the last century. As Morash points out, ocean systems are increasingly of interest to climate change scientists, and to researchers interested in the impacts of warming on marine ecosystems.
It has proved too dangerous and expensive, Morash tells us, to send humans inside submersibles to carry out much of this painstaking and time-consuming underwater research, so engineers have been designing vehicles that can do much of the work in our stead. The first generation of such vehicles required cables for power and commands from the surface, and with cameras and lights, were “not much more than flying eyeballs.” The cables proved a major limitation, constraining the vehicles operating scope and getting in the way in rough seas.
Morash and his colleagues have been cooking up a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which resemble the rovers operating on Mars. They’re fitted out with batteries, acoustic telemetry, and on board computers. “What you have is a vehicle that is happy to drive above the sea floor for hours at a time, taking endless photos of bare sand until it happens across something more exciting like a deep water coral reef or a shipwreck.” Applications for AUVs include essential, drudge missions like taking water quality samples over a wide patch of ocean, at different depths, or remote monitoring of coral reefs for decay and seasonal changes. The oil industry uses AUVs for maintaining offshore oil rigs. The Navy has requested an AUV that might serve as a disaster response platform in case of a flood, to test a watershed for “spreading pollution plumes” or to identify other waterborne hazards. And Morash’s colleagues are testing another AUV in the MIT alumni pool that is designed to dive quickly down to coral communities that serve as fish nurseries, places so deep that life is based not on sunlight but on chemosynthesis.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Jim Morash has worked as a research engineer in the MIT Sea Grant College Program's Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Laboratory since the summer of 2001. In his six and a half years as a member of the AUV Lab engineering team, Morash has worked on the design, construction, testing, and field deployment of a wide variety of marine robots, including deep diving unmanned submersibles for underwater archaeology, low-cost autonomous surface craft for disaster response and environmental monitoring, and small hybrid ROV/AUVs designed for shallow-water inspection and monitoring of man-made structures and coral reefs.
Morash joined the AUV Lab engineering team just after graduating from MIT (BS EECS '01), and recently went back to school part-time to finish his M.Eng. degree (EECS '08), studying high speed acoustic communications under the sponsorship of the Chevron-MIT University Partnership Program. Publications, and the latest updates on marine robotics projects at MIT, are available at the AUV Lab web site.
Seagrant Program website
AUV lab website
NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:03:20.
John Durant, Director of the MIT Museum, introduces the event and James Morash.
At 1:10, Morash begins.
At 20:27, Durant describes questions that the audience has formulated for Morash during breakout sessions.
These include:
What technological enhancements there might be in the next-generation AUVs, and what should such AUVs be finding out.
The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on 2008-03-25.
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