S&AS: INT: COLLAB: Goal-driven Marine Autonomy with Application to Fisheries Science and Management

海洋机器人可用于准确绘制和跟踪海洋生物，从而更好地解释变异性和迁徙模式，这对海洋保护区(MPA)的渔业管理人员很重要。工程学和海洋学原理可以用来最大限度地发挥海洋机器人网络的影响，但由于渔业管理者、海洋学家和机器人专家有不同的观点和知识库，如果不做出重大努力在各小组之间进行翻译，就很难利用每个领域的前沿研究。研究人员将开发一种计算界面，将渔业管理者的人类指定任务转化为海洋机器人舰队的多层次规划，以监测动态沿海海洋环境中的鱼类种群。该系统将根据渔业管理者通过一系列研讨会提供的意见进行设计，并将在格雷暗礁国家海洋保护区进行实地测试，格雷暗礁国家海洋保护区是佐治亚州海岸外由联邦管理的海洋保护区。这项研究将导致更准确和有效的方法来监测海洋保护区的鱼类种群，以及在人工智能和自主系统的关键领域取得突破。许多结果将适用于其他具有挑战性的环境中的智能和自主系统。此外，该项目将培养研究生，扩大科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)的本科教育，并提供一些外展活动，包括与佐治亚大学海洋推广服务部门合作，为初中生和高中生开发夏令营。该项目专注于开发一个由不同种类的海洋机器人组成的智能物理系统(IPS)，合作跟踪鱼类的运动，并在对人类干预的要求最低的情况下调查栖息地。IPS将渔业管理者的人类指定的任务转化为每个机器人的目标驱动的任务设计，并自动为联网的移动传感代理生成可执行计划。该系统将自主和持久地收集鱼类物种的现场测量和声学探测，同时保持多尺度数据流，并构建反映生态系统状况的多个时空地图。这项研究旨在发现热点(例如，鱼类持续聚集的空间位置)，并阐明有关鱼类如何以及何时在这些热点之间移动的更多信息。由于项目需求和最先进的自主研究之间存在许多差距，这一目标具有相当大的挑战性。研究人员将通过完成三项主要任务的新发展来应对挑战：(1)开发鱼类栖息地调查的目标驱动的海洋自主性，(2)实现物理系统的目标驱动的自主性，以及(3)通过真实的实地工作、实验和数据分析来评估所开发的框架。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Marine robots can be used to accurately map and track marine life, leading to a better interpretation of variability and migration patterns that are important to fisheries managers in marine protected areas (MPAs). Principles of engineering and oceanography can be used to maximize the impact of a network of marine robots, but because fisheries managers, oceanographers, and roboticists have different perspectives and knowledge bases, it can be difficult to take advantage of cutting-edge research in each field without significant effort to translate among the groups. Researchers will develop a computational interface that translates human-specified missions of fisheries managers into multi-level planning for a fleet of marine robots to monitor fish populations in a dynamic coastal ocean environment. The system will be designed with input from fisheries managers through a series of workshops, and will be field-tested at Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary, a federally-managed MPA off the coast of Georgia. The research will lead to more accurate and effective ways to monitor fish populations in MPAs, as well as breakthroughs in key areas of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. Many of the results will be applicable to other smart and autonomous systems in challenging environments. In addition, the project will train graduate students and broaden undergraduate education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and offer a number of outreach activities, including working with the University of Georgia Marine Extension service to develop a summer camp for middle and high school students.The project is focused on developing an intelligent physical system (IPS) that consists of a heterogeneous fleet of marine robots, cooperatively tracking fish movement and surveying the habitat with minimum request for human intervention. The IPS will translate the human-specified missions of fisheries managers into goal-driven task designs for each robot, and automatically generate executable plans for the networked mobile sensing agents. The system will autonomously and persistently collect in-situ measurements and acoustic detections of fish species while maintaining multi-scale data streams and constructing multiple spatial-temporal maps reflecting the conditions of the ecosystem. The research aims to discover the hotspots (e.g., spatial locations with sustained congregations of fish), as well as illuminate more information about how and when fish move among these hotspots. This goal is quite challenging due to a number of gaps between project needs and the state-of-art autonomy research. Researchers will address the challenges through new developments that accomplish three main tasks: (1) Developing the goal-driven marine autonomy for fish habitat survey, (2) realizing the goal-driven autonomy on physical systems, and (3) evaluating the developed framework through real-life field work, experiments, and data analysis.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.