WA Surveys

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Our WA campaign is done! We traversed 750km of coastline- from Hamelin Bay to the Abrolhos islands, hit 43 survey sites and took a whopping 840 thousand images of the ocean floor! Our Sirius and Nimbus AUVs worked in tandem, snapping away underwater as we rocked and rolled through some WA’s finest southerlies. Special thanks to @imos_australia @ausmarineparks @universitywa @sydney_uni @dongara_marine and Bass Marine Dongara for helping make this trip happen!

More sea floor pics to come once we process the Abrolhos images 🙂

SA Surveys

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The team joined scientists from the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) to survey sites inside and outside of Marine National Parks offshore of Kangaroo Island.  Over the course of two days hemmed in by weather the team completed 6 deployments, collecting 45,493 seafloor images.  See our instagram post.

IMOS AUV surveys at Ningaloo

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Our IMOS AUV Facility team spent last week surveying reefs at Ningaloo in WA.  These surveys were part of our IMOS AUV Facility benthic monitoring program and repeat transects first surveyed over a decade ago.  We were working with colleagues at CSIRO to collect this data and to analyse the resulting benthic images to document changes in the coral reef and sponge communities offshore of Ningaloo.  In addition to managing the deployment and recovery of the AUV, the team were also treated to some outstanding displays by the native wildlife.

IMOS AUV Survey Eastern Tasmania 2016

A number of our Marine Robotics team, including Christian Lees, Jorja Martin and Lachlan Toohey, have just returned from an eight day AUV surveying trip off the Central East Coast of Tasmania. The focus of this trip was on completing Habitat Surveys for the management of Commonwealth Marine Reserves in collaboration with IMAS. We were supported by the fearless crew of the Bluefin training vessel from AMC.

 

Exciting news from Antikythera

From the Field
Very exciting news from Antikythera in Greece, where we conducted mapping with the AUV Sirius in 2014 and 2015. The archaeologists have announced the discovery of 2000 year old bones on the site. The map generated by our AUV is featured in this piece on the Nature News site and shows the location of some of the artefacts recovered from the site.
Very proud of the whole team involved in supporting this work, and in particular Oscar and Christian who helped make it all happen.

Seminars in Japan on robotic mapping of coral reefs and underwater archeology

Outreach

The ACFR is going to Japan!  Next week Oscar will be visiting the Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) at the University of Tokyo and the Tropical Biosphere Research Center at the University of the Ryukyus. The scope of the trip includes following up on an existing collaboration with Dr Blair Thornton’s Ocean Perception Laboratory at IIS that uses some of the ACFR tools to assist in mapping artificial hydrothermal vents and seafloor areas affected by the 2011 Tōhoku Tsunami. Oscar will be encouraging new collaborations with our Japanese colleagues, presenting our capabilities for coral reef mapping to interested scientists in Okinawa as well as our underwater archeological survey results to members of IIS.

For details on the seminar at Sesoko station, check here http://www.jcrs.jp/en/seminar-announcement-dr-oscar-pizarro-sesoko/

Stay tuned for further updates.

This trip is part of of the project ‘Understanding Marine Habitats off Tōhoku Using Underwater Robots’ and is supported by the Commonwealth through the Australia-Japan Foundation, which is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.horizontal1_RGB

 

Return to Antikythera 2015

From the Field

In June, Christian, Oscar and Stefan spent a week in Greece at the site of the Antikythera shipwreck.  We were once again working on mapping the site of this first century BC shipwreck.  The 2015 AUV work is aimed at producing a complete map of the entire wreck site to provide divers with a detailed map with which to plan excavations and log finds during the diving operations to take place later in the year.

We also published the first paper describing the AUV work at Antikythera in the Field and Service Robotics conference held in Toronto in June 2015.

IMOS AUV and SOI cruise to Scott Reef, WA

From the Field

We are currently on a cruise deploying multiple, coordinated autonomous systems at Scott Reef on the Australian North West Shelf, approximately 400km north of Broome, WA.  These deployments are seeking advance two related and complementary threads in oceanographic robotics:

  1. robotic force-multiplication of research vessels using coordinated and complementary vehicles, and
  2. untended, precisely navigated groups of small long-range benthic imaging robots.

This expedition has brought together a group of international PIs who have significant experience and resources in marine robotics field operations as well as a decade-long history of productive collaboration.  Time on the Schmidt Ocean Institution vessel R/V Falkor has provided the opportunity to leverage our independent research programs into a robotic seafloor observing system of unprecedented scale and heterogeneity.  The fielded system comprise autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), a glider, a Lagrangian imaging float and an autonomous surface vessels (ASV), all working collectively to deliver a comprehensive synoptic view of the benthos, seafloor structure, and relevant local oceanography.