CUREE: A Curious Underwater Robot for Ecosystem Exploration
This provides a new robotic solution for scientists to better capture ecosystem interactions in underwater environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing robotics and perception methods.
The paper tackles the problem of exploring and monitoring complex underwater ecosystems like coral reefs by introducing the CUREE platform, which uses robot behaviors and perception algorithms to conduct low-altitude visual surveys, soundscape surveys, habitat characterization, and animal following, demonstrated through field deployments in the US Virgin Islands where it identified snapping shrimp habitat preferences and followed barracuda and stingray for several minutes.
The current approach to exploring and monitoring complex underwater ecosystems, such as coral reefs, is to conduct surveys using diver-held or static cameras, or deploying sensor buoys. These approaches often fail to capture the full variation and complexity of interactions between different reef organisms and their habitat. The CUREE platform presented in this paper provides a unique set of capabilities in the form of robot behaviors and perception algorithms to enable scientists to explore different aspects of an ecosystem. Examples of these capabilities include low-altitude visual surveys, soundscape surveys, habitat characterization, and animal following. We demonstrate these capabilities by describing two field deployments on coral reefs in the US Virgin Islands. In the first deployment, we show that CUREE can identify the preferred habitat type of snapping shrimp in a reef through a combination of a visual survey, habitat characterization, and a soundscape survey. In the second deployment, we demonstrate CUREE's ability to follow arbitrary animals by separately following a barracuda and stingray for several minutes each in midwater and benthic environments, respectively.