CENS Technical Seminar Series

Underwater Sensor Networking: Fleets of Drifters

Invited Speaker: Prof Curt Schurgers, ECE, UCSD
Date: January 25, 2008
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: CENS Conference Room

Abstract

With the increasing sophistication of both manned and unmanned systems for remote ocean exploration, a wealth of knowledge about heretofore-unknown oceanic processes has become available. However, no technologies currently exist to observe organisms and processes without disturbing them, as they move with the natural motion of the oceans. As a new and exciting option, we envision a sensor network of underwater oceanic drifters. This network would consist of small, easily deployable autonomous profilers that move freely sub-surface with the ocean currents. Collecting sensor data and organized in small fleets, they form a distributed and networked sampling system. This would enable us, for example, to study the spatial and temporal scales over which planktonic communities change and evolve, or predict the spread of patches, such as oil spills. In this talk, we will present our overall project, which is a collaboration of the ECE and MAE Departments at UCSD and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and focus on specific sensor networking challenges that have emerged, such as efficient self-localization.

Biography

Curt Schurgers is an assistant professor at the ECE Department of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He received his M.S. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), Belgium, in 1997. Subsequently, he was a researcher at IMEC, Belgium, until joining UCLA as a graduate student in 1999. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 on the topic of energy efficient wireless communications, working with Prof. Mani Srivastava. After one year as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, he joined the faculty at UCSD in Sept. 2003. His current research includes projects on underwater networking, ad hoc networking and sensor networking.