(MENAFN- The Peninsula)
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar's (CMU-Q) Gianni Di Caro (pictured), is using artificial intelligence and a fleet of autonomous marine robots to better explore the marine environment around Qatar. Di Caro, who is leading a team of researchers, is an associate teaching professor at CMU-Q, a Qatar Foundation partner university. To better understand marine environments, researchers create information maps of data like depth, water quality, and salinity. This information is critical for a country like Qatar, which balances offshore oil and gas operations with the preservation and sustainability of a fragile marine ecosystem. Typically, information maps are created by sending, every a few months, a single, big, manually operated boat to sample data at pre-defined points, one at-a-time. This method has serious drawbacks, including the fact that sampling is sequential and static. In fact, it doesn't adaptively select where to sample based on gathered evidence, since data processing is done offline. Di Caro's team has rethought the process: 'We are using AI to coordinate a fleet of unmanned and relatively small aerial and marine robots to gather data over a large area. Using this swarm approach allows sampling data from different locations at the same time and continually and automatically adapting the mission to freshly gathered data, resulting in more accurate maps. The project is called Teams of Aquatic/Aerial Robots for Marine Environment Monitoring, or TARMEM, and is funded by a grant to CMU-Q from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). Led by Di Caro, the team also includes Italian investigators Filippo Arrichiello from the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, and Enrico Simetti from the University of Genova
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