Towards an AUV Swarm Based Mobile Underwater Sensor Network for Invasive Species Data Acquisition

Ecological data acquisition, refinement, and analysis methods have not kept pace with advancements in mobile sensor technology and applications of machine learning techniques due to the typical “stovepiping” of the sciences. Environmental sensor networks are an emerging technology which leverages advances in distributed sensing to realize real time rich data streams for researchers. When this network is made mobile it presents a disruptive technology with the potential to reveal new phenomena and questions as observations, that were once too dangerous or costly to obtain, becomes possible. In this concept paper, we motivate and present preliminaries in our investigation pertaining to the use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in swarms to realize a mobile sensor network targeting invasive species in the Great Lakes.