Event
MRC Seminar: Robust Subsea Sensing and Mobile Robot Navigation
Friday, February 7, 2025
2:00 p.m.
JMP 2116
Robust subsea sensing and mobile robot navigation: from telerobotics to autonomous stealth missions
Md Jahidul Islam, Ph.D.
Director, RoboPI Laboratory
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Florida
Abstract
We are going through a paradigm shift in how autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are deployed to support subsea sensing, stealth navigation, and surface communication capabilities. Despite significant developments in recent years across academia and industry, there remain many challenges and important research frontiers. This talk highlights these challenging open problems and presents the evolving technologies on robust subsea sensing and low-power standalone operation. The first part of the talk presents our recent works on ensuring robust subsea sensing and estimation for vision-guided robots, especially focusing on closed-form solutions to deal with the scarcity of salient semantic features in real-time. The second part of the talk will present our proposed technologies to go beyond visual and acoustic perception by leveraging optical and magnetoelectric modalities for mobile robot localization and long-distance surface communication. These solutions will be discussed from two important use-case perspectives: (i) interactive telerobotics by ROVs, and (ii) autonomous stealth operations by AUVs. Finally, the third part of the talk will demonstrate how these capabilities can be extended by vision-language integration for pre-deployment mission planning/programming, mid-deployment communication and interaction, and post-deployment robot recovery.
Biography
Md Jahidul Islam is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the University of Florida (UF). He received his Ph.D. (2021) in Robotics from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research focuses on enabling active perception and navigation capabilities of autonomous underwater robots in challenging subsea applications. At UF, he leads the RoboPI (Robot Perception and Intelligence) group toward developing next-generation robotics systems for subsea inspection, surveillance, and long-term monitoring. His current projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), and Texas Instruments (TI). His research publications are featured in premier robotics conferences and journals, with over 3,000 scholarly citations and two best paper awards in the past three years. He is a member of IEEE, RAS, and SPIE; and serves as an associate editor of IEEE ICRA since 2023.
