WINTER 2025 OREGON STATE ENGINEERING 10 Oregon State University researchers are leading a national team of scientists and engineers on a threeyear, $1.5 million project to develop and test a team of robots that could travel under ice shelves and collect critical measurements about the extent of ice cavities and surrounding ocean properties. The effort, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, is designed to help advance underwater exploration in confined and hard-to-reach environments such as cavities under ice shelves. Warming ocean conditions are causing polar ice sheets and ice shelves, which are floating extensions of ice sheets, to melt rapidly and contribute to global sea level rise, but studying the impact of this phenomenon poses a significant challenge for researchers who have limited tools to physically reach dangerous and deep, distant cavities beneath ice using existing tools. “We need robots that can travel into these areas and also travel back out,” said Jessica Garwood, assistant professor of oceanography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the project’s co-principal investigator. ROBOT SWARMS TO EXPLORE MELTING ICE SHELVES Marine robotics is thriving at Oregon State, boosted by the university’s top-ranked oceanography program, facilities like the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, organizations like the Pacific Marine Energy Center and the PacWave facility under construction off the coast of Newport, Oregon, and the new Gaulke Center for Marine Innovation and Technology. But it’s not easy, says the project’s other co-principal investigator, Geoff Hollinger, professor of robotics and the Ron and Judy Adams Faculty Scholar. Land-based solutions for communication and perception don’t work very well underwater. Wi-Fi, cellphones, and GPS are useless in the ocean, and cameras operate only in clear conditions. The research team’s goal is to develop a system with a large “mothership” robot that will carry and deploy a swarm of smaller passenger robots that could spread out and explore the waters under a melting ice shelf or other hard-to-access locations. The robots would operate autonomously and be programmed with decision-making ability based on conditions. The “proof-of-concept” project includes building the deployment and recovery system for the parent robot and the swarm of passenger robots; developing hardware and protocols for Graduate students (left to right) Robin Singh, Collin Mitchell, and Emily Scheide test one of the many robots designed and built in the Robotic Decision-Making Laboratory.
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