Robotic Lake and River Monitoring

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***Canada has the third largest renewable freshwater supply in the world. We have as many as 2 million lakes and hundreds of thousands of kilometres of rivers, covering about 7.6% of our land mass. Water is clearly one of Canada's largest and most precious resources, yet one that we often take for granted. With increasing industrialization and climate change well underway, it is going to be critical to be able to safeguard our water for the future. A big part of this will be the ability to monitor the levels of pollution and the impact on wildlife in our lakes and rivers. With so many waterbodies to watchdog, we believe that technology in the form of Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) may be able to help, by automating the data collection process (e.g., water sampling, temperature mapping, shoreline imagery). This proposal requests funds to purchase a Clearpath Robotics USV to conduct research into robotic lake and river water monitoring. We aim to support the dedicated scientists who are monitoring, cleaning up, and understanding the lakes and rivers in Canada. We hope to participate in a citizen science effort to monitor the Toronto waterfront and envision a student initiative with regular deployments of the USV at key sites; data will be geotagged and provided through a publicly available database.