LA Oil Spill

One year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, GTSR performed a survey in Grand Isle, Louisiana as heavy pollution was reported here during the oil spill. GTSR's fleet of marine robots collected data to evaluate the level of oil remaining after large scale cleanup operations. I had the opportunity to lead a team of students to implement curve tracking controllers on GTSR's autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) Victoria and a Fetch class autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV-Fetch 1) developed by Prof. Mark Patterson at the College of William and Mary, Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. Our efforts evaluated to controller performance of the marine robots employed in the survey. Disturbances like winds and current, and limitations like sensor inaccuracy, localization error and communication delays affected performance but, the experimental results showed that the control laws are robust to disturbances and faults. The team collected a large amount of data to evaluate the level of reminiscent oil in the area after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

This project saw collaboration between the Math department at Louisiana State University and the electrical and computer engineering department at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Links:

• More news about the project from Dr. Fumin Zhang's pages can be found here.

• For a collection of various articles about the project and other details, see Dr. Michael Malisoff's page here.