Podcast: Charm's Carbon Offsets, Fitness Trainer Drones, MIT Studies Sound Waves In The North Pole

Farbod Moghaddam

fromThe Next Byte

27 Apr, 2021

Joggobot in action

In this episode, we talk about Charm Industrial’s novel approach for carbon offsetting, a concept fitness drone from Hongik University that could be the first to commercialize, and a joint effort between MIT and US Navy to understand how sound waves are altered by water conditions in the North Pole.

autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)

- Autonomous Vehicles

- biomechanics

- unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

In this episode, we talk about Charm Industrial’s novel approach for carbon offsetting, a concept fitness drone from Hongik University that could be the first to commercialize, and a joint effort between MIT and the US Navy to understand how sound waves are altered by water conditions in the North Pole. As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

EPISODE NOTES

(0:50) - A Charming Response To The Carbon Offsetting Controversy:

Approximately 85% of all carbon offsetting efforts do not actually remove any additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and Charm wants to change that by injecting bio oil into wells that stored crude oil at one point.

(8:10) - Drones As Personal Fitness Instructors :

Drones are finally making their debut in the fitness scene with a concept design from Hongik University that could serve as the first commercially viable fitness drone and pave the way for the future of the industry.

(14:20) - MIT & ONR’s Trip To The North Pole:

Acoustic signals get distorted in regions of the ocean where warm water meets cold water - especially in the Beaufort Sea - so MIT has collaborated with ONR to understand these distortions in hopes of allowing exploration in these regions without risking loss of communication.

About the podcast:

Every day, some of the most innovative universities, companies, and individual technology developers share their knowledge on Wevolver. To ensure we can also provide this knowledge for the growing group of podcast listeners, we started a collaboration with two young engineers, Daniel Scott Mitchell & Farbod Moghaddam who discuss the most interesting content in this podcast series.

To learn more about this show, please visit the shows page. By following the page, you will get automatic updates by email when a new show is published.

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Cornell, US Navy raise bar for autonomous underwater imaging

Tests conducted by Cornell and the U.S. Navy used new algorithms to outperform state-of-the-art programming for autonomous underwater sonar imaging, significantly improving the speed and accuracy for identifying objects such as explosive mines, sunken ships, airplane black boxes, pipelines, etc.

Syl Kacapyr

fromCornell University

27 May, 2022

autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)

- swimming robots

Tests conducted by Cornell and the U.S. Navy used new algorithms to outperform state-of-the-art programming for autonomous underwater sonar imaging, significantly improving the speed and accuracy for identifying objects such as explosive mines, sunken ships, airplane black boxes, pipelines and corrosion on ship hulls.

Sea reconnaissance is filled with challenges that include murky waters, unpredictable conditions and vast areas of subaquatic terrain. Sonar is the preferred imaging method in most cases, but acoustic waves can be difficult to decipher, often requiring different angles and views of an object before it can be identified.

“If you have a lot of targets and they’re distributed over a large region, it takes a long time to classify them all,” said Silvia Ferrari, the John Brancaccio Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, who led the research published May 24 in the journal IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering. “Sometimes an autonomous underwater vehicle won't be able to finish the mission because it has limited battery life.”

To improve the capability of these vehicles, Ferrari’s research group teamed up with the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City, and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport, Virginia. The team created and tested a new imaging approach called informative multi-view planning, which integrates information about where objects might be located with sonar processing algorithms that decide the optimal views, and the most efficient path to obtain those views. The planning algorithms take into account the sonar sensor’s field-of-view geometry along with each target’s position and orientation, and can make on-the-fly adjustments based on current sea conditions.

In computer simulated tests, the research team’s algorithms competed against state-of-the-art imaging methods to complete multi-target classification tasks. The new algorithms were able to complete the tasks in just half the time, and with

Image: A battery-free, wireless underwater camera developed at MIT could have many uses, including climate modeling. “We are missing data from over 95 percent of the ocean. This technology could help us build more accurate climate models and better understand how climate change impacts the underwater world,” says Associate Professor Fadel Adib. Image: Adam Glanzman

Engineers build a battery-free, wireless underwater camera

The device could help scientists explore unknown regions of the ocean, track pollution, or monitor the effects of climate change.

Adam Zewe

28 Sep, 2022

autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)

- electronics

- sensors

This article was first published on MIT News.

Scientists estimate that more than 95 percent of Earth’s oceans have never been observed, which means we have seen less of our planet’s ocean than we have the far side of the moon or the surface of Mars.

The high cost of powering an underwater camera for a long time, by tethering it to a research vessel or sending a ship to recharge its batteries, is a steep challenge preventing widespread undersea exploration.

MIT researchers have taken a major step to overcome this problem by developing a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that is about 100,000 times more energy-efficient than other undersea cameras. The device takes color photos, even in dark underwater environments, and transmits image data wirelessly through the water.

The autonomous camera is powered by sound. It converts mechanical energy from sound waves traveling through water into electrical energy that powers its imaging and communications equipment. After capturing and encoding image data, the camera also uses sound waves to transmit data to a receiver that reconstructs the image.

Because it doesn’t need a power source, the camera could run for weeks on end before retrieval, enabling scientists to search remote parts of the ocean for new species. It could also be used to capture images of ocean pollution or monitor the health and growth of fish raised in aquaculture farms.

“One of the most exciting applications of this camera for me personally is in the context of climate monitoring. We are building climate models, but we are missing data from over 95 percent of the ocean. This technology could help us build more accurate climate models and better understand how climate change impacts the underwater world,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab, and senior author of a new

Podcast: Charm's Carbon Offsets, Fitness Trainer Drones, MIT Studies Sound Waves In The North Pole

EPISODE NOTES

What are underwater ROVs & What can they be used for?

Self propelling robots

Dolphin Tracking UAVs

EPISODE NOTES

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