Five Oregon State University (OSU) researchers have received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant will be used to study the operation of autonomous marine vehicles.

Building on cross-campus collaborations, the project brings together engineers and ocean scientists so that they can produce “innovations in OSU-developed ocean-sensing technologies,” such as the robotic oceanographer surface sampler (ROSS), and advanced underwater glider operations.

Ultimately, the project will look improve the autonomous capabilities of vehicles by increasing their “neglect tolerance,” which is the ability to function for long periods of time despite minimal or no communication with a human technician.

“Underwater exploration using unmanned robotic vehicles has opened up vast new ways of understanding the world’s oceans,” says Geoff Hollinger, who is one of the five principal investigators on the $1 million grant.

A member of the College of Engineering, Hollinger adds, “however, in the current state of practice, human operators must provide specific waypoints for the vehicles to follow, which is both time consuming and inflexible.”

Hollinger goes on to explain that “the research in this project will develop autonomy capabilities that facilitate on-vehicle intelligence, leading to longer duration deployments of unmanned underwater and surface vehicles as well as improving the oceanographic data collected and reducing the cost of these deployments.”

This grant from the NSF is just the latest that OSU has received for research related to autonomous systems and robotics.

The College of Engineering received $3.6 million in robotics-related funding in fiscal year 2017. The year before that, it received nearly $2 million.

Recently, the College of Engineering also received a $6.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which will be used make artificial-intelligence-based systems, such as autonomous vehicles and robots, more trustworthy.