Advancing Autonomy for Marine Robots through Improved Situational Awareness and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty, presentation by Dr. Brendan Englot, Stevens Institute of Technology

Abstract: This talk will discuss two research projects aimed at advancing the autonomy of marine robots operating in complex environments. The first is inspired by the need for underwater robots to serve as resident autonomous systems for offshore infrastructure, including at aquaculture sites. To achieve the situational awareness needed for autonomous inspection and precise physical intervention, I will discuss recent work that aims to produce accurate, high-definition 3D maps of underwater infrastructure using wide-aperture multi-beam imaging sonar, an underwater sensing technology that permits long-range sensing with wide area coverage in turbid water. A drawback of this sensor technology is the flattened, 2D imagery it produces from 3D observations. Several novel techniques will be discussed that eliminate ambiguity and enable dense 3D mapping of underwater structures. The second topic is inspired by the need for intelligent decision-making in stochastic environments by teams of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). I will describe a multi-year research effort to identify practical and impactful ways to apply Distributional Reinforcement Learning to autonomous navigation for USVs in disturbance-filled environments. Our results include several open-source algorithm implementations and benchmarking tools that advance the capabilities of Sim2Real for marine robots. 

Bio: Dr. Brendan Englot joined Stevens Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 2014, and he is currently the Anson Wood Burchard Endowed Professor, and Director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Brendan is also the recipient of a 2017 NSF CAREER award and a 2020 ONR Young Investigator award. Prior to his time at Stevens, he was a research scientist at United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a Principal Investigator in the Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics Laboratory and a technical contributor to the Sikorsky Autonomous Research Aircraft. Brendan received S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2007, 2009 and 2012, respectively. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a co-author of eight U.S. patents and more than 75 refereed journal and conference papers.