Advancing Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Capability for Assessment of Marine Pollution

海洋污染是一个全球性的环境问题，对环境和社会经济都有严重的不利影响。石油泄漏是污染的一种形式；进一步的化学径流和海洋中的塑料是其他形式的污染。气候变化和我们的生态系统的严重退化是这种污染的一些结果。风险增加，墨西哥湾的深水地平线井喷，毛里求斯的MV Wakashio，2018年和2019年在纽芬兰附近发生的漏油事件，扩大了对漏油对策的潜在需求与当前应对能力之间的差距。关于水柱中石油和其他污染的信息对于了解地下羽流的行为至关重要，这反过来又能够及时和有效地缓解。在墨西哥湾井喷事故发生后，自主水下机器人哨兵被成功地用来确定被困在大约1200米深处的沉没石油的特征，并提供了对受影响区域的全面分析。在这项研究中，AUV的能力将专门用于了解海洋污染和应对：首先，将研究一种创新的自适应任务规划方法，用于由不可溶油滴云或其他潜在感兴趣的物品(如微塑料)组成的不连续片状羽流，以提高AUV及其船上传感器在描绘地下羽流方面的性能。利用自适应采样，AUV根据机载传感器检测到的羽流特征实时自主修改其任务路径。因此，AUV路径集中在感兴趣的区域和传感器识别的信息丰富的区域，从而优化AUV响应。其次，将与加拿大AUV制造商合作研究远程AUV能力，以完成广泛的高耐力海洋污染监测任务，目的是建立导致缓解措施的监督和警报。第三，将研究对监测海洋污染所需的这些远程远程作业进行基于风险的分析，并开发新的方法，以确保最大限度地减少AUV对人、船和船等其他海洋使用者的风险，以及将水下噪音和潜在污染对环境的风险降至最低。随着越来越多的自动驾驶车辆进入海面，这是一个必不可少的组成部分。这项研究的目标群体包括监管机构、海洋污染机构、漏油应对组织、近海石油行业、AUV制造商、运营商和海洋学家。

Marine pollution is a global environmental problem that has severe adverse environmental and socio-economic impacts. Oil spills are one form of pollution; further chemical run-off and plastics in the ocean are others. Climate change and severe degradation of our ecosystem are some of the outcomes from this pollution. Increased risks, the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the MV Wakashio in Mauritius, spills off Newfoundland in 2018 and 2019, have broadened the gap between the potential need for oil spill countermeasures and current response capabilities. Information about oil and other pollution in the water column is critical to understanding of subsurface plume behavior which in turn enables timely and effective mitigation. Following the Gulf of Mexico blowout, the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Sentry was successfully used to characterize submerged oil that was trapped at a depth of approximately 1200 m and provided a comprehensive analysis of the impacted areas. In this research AUV capabilities will be advanced specifically for the understanding of marine pollution and response: Firstly, an innovative adaptive mission planning approach for discontinuous patchy plumes made up of non-soluble oil droplet clouds or other potential items of interest such as micro-plastics, will be researched to improve performance of AUVs and their onboard sensors in delineating subsurface plumes. Using adaptive sampling, the AUV autonomously modifies its mission path in real-time based on features of the plumes detected by on-board sensors. Hence the AUV path is concentrated within the areas of interest and in information-rich areas identified by the sensors, optimizing the AUV response. Secondly, long-range AUV capability will be researched in conjunction with Canadian AUV manufacturers to enable extensive high-endurance marine pollution monitoring tasks to be completed with the aim to put in place watchdog and alerts that lead to mitigation measures. Renewable-energy battery charging at the water surface coupled with autonomous navigation and collision avoidance systems, similarly to those being developed for autonomous shipping, will be incorporated to enable these new designs of AUVs to operate safely over long periods in the ocean surface environment.  Thirdly, risk-based analysis of these remote long range operations required for the monitoring of marine pollution will be researched and new methods will be developed to ensure that the risks of AUV deployment to other ocean users, such as people, ships and boats, as well as to the environment through underwater noise and the potential for pollution, are minimized. This is an essential component as an increasing number of autonomous vehicles populates the ocean surface.  The target community of this research includes regulators, marine pollution agencies, oil spill response organizations, the offshore petroleum industry, AUV manufacturers, operators and oceanographers.