October 1, 2015
The project MORPH, funded by the European Union, aims at affording marine scientist and commercial operators a revolutionary tool for marine habitat mapping in complex underwater 3D environments. In the Azores a team led by Prof. Andreas Birk has succesfully tested methods developed in the Jacobs robotics group. In addition to the very fast generation of high quality 3D maps the Jacobs team demonstrated intelligent behaviors on the robots to autonomously extract semantic information. For example, when a vehicle recognized that it passed a more interesting part of the environment, e.g. with a higher amount of marine life than just a plain rock part of the cliff, it autonomously slowed down to gather more data. The MORPH team consisted of 41 scientists from five countries and nine member organizations.
Picture credits MORPH, ATLAS ELEKTRONIK GmbH, Andreas Birk