CAREER: Embedded DSP with Underwater Renewable Energy: Towards Sustainability for Cyber-Aquatic Systems

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Dedicated digital signal processing (DSP) is a key technology for a diversity of embedded applications. Recently, underwater autonomous distributed systems have received growing interest in aquatic observation and exploration. These systems pose significant challenges for sustainable signal processing due to the high communication cost and new constraints on energy supply in the harsh underwater environment. The relatively mature and predictable energy harvesting techniques are either not applicable in the underwater environment or do not offer sufficient capabilities. This raises dual challenges to the design of dedicated DSP for cyber-aquatic systems with respect to what alternative energy sources are available and how to effectively and reliably utilize renewable energy.This CAREER project seeks to overcome these challenges arising at the cyber-aquatic interface. The goal is to develop a new DSP design framework that allows dynamic tuning of system complexity/performance and energy-efficiency levels in adaptation with renewable underwater energy sources. The results from this research will enable sustainable cyber-aquatic systems that have great potential for innovations but have remained largely unexplored so far. Design tools and optimization methods developed from this project can be applied to a wide range of embedded applications powered by various energy sources.The education component of this project seeks to strengthen interdisciplinary education through a dynamic curriculum that builds on this research project. Through industry collaboration and outreach programs at UConn, this project will offer research opportunities to students especially women and underrepresented minority students, and enhance engineering awareness and interests among high-school students.