Jaffe Laboratory for Underwater Imaging

Today results from our first field deployment with a swarm of Autonomous Underwater Explorers (M-AUEs) were published in the journal Nature Communications. The article describes the deployment of 16 M-AUEs several kilometers off the coast of Torrey Pines State Park. Along with the M-AUEs, a surface array of acoustic pingers was deployed in a pentagon formation and used to track the M-AUEs underwater in three dimensions. The resulting tracks were used to visualize internal waves propagating through the swarm. The article: A Swarm of Autonomous Miniature Underwater Robot Drifters for Exploring Submesoscale Ocean Dynamics was authored by Jules S. Jaffe, Peter J. S. Franks, Paul L. D. Roberts, Diba Mirza, Curt Schurgers, Ryan Kastner and Adrien Boch.

We would like to thank Rich Walsh who provided small boat support during the development of the M-AUEs and the operations performed during these experiments, Devin Ratelle, Eric Orenstein, Phil  Bresnahan, Mike Ouimet, and Mike Bianco for assisting in the deployment and recovery during the experiment, and the maintainers of the OAR/Keck Pool at SIO for facilitating countless hours of pool testing leading up to the field work.

Below are videos and articles covering the work.

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Yesterday we competed the first of hopefully many experiments to study the effect of internal waves on the distribution of plankton in the ocean. The experiment was ambitious, consisting of deploying 16 small autonomous floats multiple times per day, 5 surface pingers, two bottom mounted ADCPs, two thermistor strings, one wirewalker with CTD, optical sensors, acoustic backscatter, and real-time data telemetry, and a dual magnification plankton microscope attached to the end of a plankton net, rapid vertical CTD profiles from a second CTD, and a helikite to observe the surface signal of internal waves. The experiment spanned three weeks and included 100s of autonomous float profiles, 3,564 wirewalker profiles, millions of plankton images, 100s of CTD cast, and close to zero data or instrument loss. A great success! Below are a few images shot over the coarse of the experiment.

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Last week Eric Orenstein delivered a new build of the SPC system to Eric Danner’s group at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, CA. This new build incorporates larger optics to yield a 0.5 L imaged volume, a brightfield illumination to work well even in turbid river and estuary waters, and a custom flow chamber to allow drift nets, pumps, and other methods to collect plankton and pipe them through the imaged volume. More details about the new system can be found on the research page: SPC NOAA Fisheries

We had two excellent design teams this year work on the problem of building small open source AUVs. They just competed their final projects and have some excellent results. Click on the image below for more details or follow this link: Open Source Nano AUVs

Last week we delivered a brand new build of our SPC system to Rob Campbell at the Prince William Sound Science Center in Cordova, Alaska. The new build features a much larger imaged volume, a new method for attaching the strobe housing to the camera housing, all new electronics including a faster ODROID processor with 8 cores at 2 GHz, and a revised version of our real time object detection software. More details about the system and its application in Rob’s profiling mooring are available on the research projects page: SPC Prince William Sound Science Center

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We just wrapped up some extensive field work in Little Cayman with two other research groups from Scripps Oceanography, the Semmens Lab, and the Marine Bioacoustics Lab. The goal of the work was to deploy our AUEs, pingers, plankton net camera, and underwater 360 GoPro camera in the midst of the Nasau Grouper spawning event.

We deployed most of the gear in January but got skunked on the spawning event and also lost a few instruments. We then returned with a smaller team last week to complete the mission and were able to collect some great data with the net camera and the 360 GoPro camera.

For more information about the net camera please see the research page: SPC Net Camera

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Last week we completed the first test of our underwater imaging lidar system in a target range off Coronado. The system worked very well and recorded some outstanding images of our resolution target and other targets. The tow platform and supporting system electronics worked well in spite of some less than ideal conditions.

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Under a generous, anonymous donation to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, we have built and deployed a new version of our plankton cameras at the end of Scripps Pier. The installation is named the Scripps Plankton Camera System and consists of two in situ, color, darkfield microscopes with complementary magnification and resolution designed to image plankton in the range of 10s of microns up to 10s of millimeters. For more information about the cameras, and to view the hundreds of thousands of plankton imaged each day, please visit http://spc.ucsd.edu or click on the image below.