News Photo by Darby Hinkley The collaborative research team working in Thunder Bay includes, from left, Onur Bagoren and Anja Sheppard, of the University of Michigan, Mason Pesson, Corina Barbalata, and William Ard, of Louisiana State University, Jamey Anderson, of Michigan Technological University, and Katie Skinner, of the University of Michigan.

ALPENA — In a project funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Ocean Exploration Program, three universities have teamed up to explore the depths of Thunder Bay.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, and Louisiana State University combined efforts on Friday, boarding a boat headed out into Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary to deploy autonomous vessels for data collection.

“Our goal is to develop methods to deploy robots to search for shipwrecks, and then survey shipwrecks with their sensors,” said Katie Skinner, assistant professor of robotics at the University of Michigan. “We have several different types of robots. We have autonomous underwater vehicles, which can be deployed to conduct surveys on their own, and we have been sending those out to collect side-scan sonar imagery.”

According to NOAA.gov, “Side-scan sonar is a category of active sonar system for detecting and imaging objects on the seafloor. The multiple physical sensors of the sonar — called a transducer array — send and receive the acoustic pulses that help map the seafloor or detect other objects.”

“From that, we’ll collect the data, back on the boat, and run our AI methods on the sonar data that we collect, so that we can identify exactly where the shipwreck is,” Skinner noted.

Skinner added that they are also using remotely operated vehicles that they are testing autonomy on for autonomous surveys of shipwrecks, up close.

“Then we’ll deploy the ROV to do an autonomous survey over the boat itself,” she said. “This vehicle is meant to do close-range imaging surveys, so it can really get up close and collect a lot of imagery of the site, and then we can build a 3D model from all of that imagery.”

She explained what this research accomplishes.

“The goal is to develop methods that would allow us to send a robot out on its own over really large area searches throughout the entire sanctuary,” Skinner said. “And then come back and tell us what it found. So the goal is to reduce cost and time that it would usually take to do these types of missions so that we can accelerate exploration and discovery of new shipwreck sites.”

Anja Sheppard and Onur Bagoren, robotics Ph.D. students at the University of Michigan, are participating in the field work expedition in Alpena, which began June 5 and continues through the end of this week.

“I really enjoy what I do,” said Bagoren, from Istanbul, Turkey. “I love robotics, and I love the unique area that we work in, and that it’s field-centric, it’s supporting and working with scientists to learn more about our environment and our world.”

“I really like the hands-on component of it,” said Sheppard, from North Carolina. “I studied computer science in undergrad, so my background is in the software side and machine learning … I think robotics is a really cool intersection of a lot of fields. It lets you be multidisciplinary in your work.”

Bagoren said every day is interesting in robotics.

“You really have to think about ‘How do I imbue intelligence into these complicated systems? How would I go about doing this?’ So, there’s that creative design process of taking what you think you would be doing, and then trying to make a robot emulate that,” Bagoren said. “That’s the really nice thing about this type of field work, and space as well, is we can’t really go up there and do the things that these robots are doing for the elongated periods they can, so when you have designed something that can, it feels like a part of you is doing it.”

Visit the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday to hear Skinner give a free lecture about Deploying Robots and Artificial Intelligence to Search for Shipwreck Sites. She will explore new technology and innovative methods to advance autonomous capabilities of marine robotic systems for search and survey of shipwreck sites.

The main goal of this work is to increase efficiency and decrease cost for these missions.