Exploring Fronts with Multiple Robots

When you build a house, you do not use only a hammer, but a variety of specialized tools in an organized and collaborative manner to construct a complex structure. The same idea holds true in oceanography, and as such, Principal Investigator João Tasso de Figueiredo Borges de Sousa of the Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologias Subaquáticas (LSTS) from Porto University and his team are working to construct a network that manages multiple autonomous vehicles simultaneously. At the Subtropical Front, located approximately 1,000 nautical miles off the coast of Southern California, the multidisciplinary team will work towards establishing a new method for observing dynamic, constantly changing ocean systems and processes with autonomous vehicles that are constantly in contact with themselves and a remote control center.