Tom Kwasnitschka

GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research 

Dr. Tom Kwasnitschka received his PhD in Geology from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany, and has been a researcher at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel since 2007. His research focuses on robotic exploration of deep ocean environments, particularly in the field of physical volcanology of seamounts, very deep explosive volcanism, and the temporal evolution of hydrothermal edifices. Further fields of his research are habitat mapping of cold and warm water coral as well as methane hydrate monitoring. He has pioneered the use of high-resolution 3D photogrammetric reconstruction of seafloor outcrops, develops camera and lighting systems to collect such data and has worked with imagery gathered by most major ROV and AUV systems. Tom also conducts research on the use of immersive virtual reality infrastructure to enhance telepresence at sea and visualize multimodal marine and seafloor data. He takes an active role in the popularization of such datasets throughout the international museum community.

Ocean Sciences offer inherent challenges and opportunities for soft robotics because of the liquid environment, the pressure, temperature, but chiefly because of the sheer remoteness of the target area. A critical sub-discipline is formed by seafloor studies, adding the requirement to interact with fixed, hard or heavy objects. Once more, water as a carrier medium offers interesting perspectives e.g. through entrainment of objects.

We take a look at current practices in robotic seafloor exploration which is still largely based on commercial rigid robotics. From this point, a couple of interesting perspectives for soft robotics emerge, provided that a number of aspects of reliability and economy of scale can be resolved.