Invited as Distinguished Lecturer at SeaClear 1.0 and 2.0 Projects Winter School

As the SeaClear 1.0 & 2.0 Projects Winter School comes to a close, I want to reflect on a great week and thank the organisers, speakers and attendees for a very worthwhile trip to Germany.

The talks covered many topics, from perception to control, path planning and optimisation. It was great to learn about concepts and applications outside of my usual bread and butter, including robot teaming between drones and AUVs and using robots to manage the thousands of tonnes of WW2 era unexploded ordinances in oceans around Europe.

A few more of my favourite moments:

👀❓Marija Popović’s lecture on active sensing for environmental monitoring - this really got me thinking about how perception and planning comes together, and the ways we can consider and model uncertainty in an adaptive planning system.

📸🔈Kaya ter Burg covering her work on detection of marine debris with both vision and sonar - I learnt a lot about multimodal fusion strategies and the operational pros and cons of each.

🤖📍Daniel Duecker’s talk on small AUVs, which had my favourite quote of the week: “The three key questions in underwater robotics are: what robot do I need, where should my robot go, and where the heck is my robot?”

I also had the opportunity to present my research on underwater computer vision, and really enjoyed the longer form lecture style, for which I developed some interactive tools to help with intuitively understanding feature extractors and unpacking error types in underwater object detection (thanks to my student Melanie Wille for her support with this)!

Overall a great week had, thanks again and I will head back to Australia with many new marine robotics ideas and friends ✨

Speakers and organisers: Stefan Sosnowski, Lucian Busoniu, Gerard Ciurana Caire, Nikolas Dahn, Ivana Palunko, Domagoj Tolic, Nathalie Bauschmann, Hatem Sultan.