This free community event will feature a presentation by Katie Skinner, an assistant professor of robotics at the University of Michigan. This lecture will blend cutting-edge technology with Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary shipwrecks.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the event will conclude at 7:30 p.m.

Robots are becoming essential tools for ocean exploration, but current robot systems still require extensive human oversight to complete missions. One main challenge is the limitations to sensing underwater. Camera images are often hazy or degraded. Acoustic sensors are widely used, but acoustic images are noisy and difficult to interpret. This limits robot capabilities to sense, map, and perceive their environments. In particular, robots are not able to densely map complex underwater environments in real-time.

This presentation will discuss new work to develop methods for multi-sensor fusion of camera and sonar imagery to provide robots with a new capability to densely map complex underwater structures — shipwrecks — in real-time. This will enable robots to better navigate challenging environments and avoid potential hazards. It will also allow for the creation of 3D models of shipwrecks more quickly to accelerate new scientific discoveries.

Katie Skinner

Skinner holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. Prior to this appointment, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received an M.S. and Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan, and a B.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a Certificate in Applications of Computing from Princeton University. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award.

For more information, visit thunderbayfriends.org.