Low-cost Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Continuous Multi-Depth Ocean Monitoring

  • Project Year: 2025-26
  • Departments Represented: MEng
  • Industry/Track: Robotics, Aerospace, or Automotive Advancements

Understanding conditions below the ocean surface is critical for coastal science, climate research, and environmental management, but collecting this data is often expensive and limited to short research deployments. Consequently, important subsurface changes can go undetected. To address this gap, our team is developing a low-cost autonomous sailboat for multi-depth ocean monitoring. The system combines autonomous navigation and a winch that profiles the water column using a CTD sensor and sediment sampler. By providing repeated measurements at different depths, the platform aims to frequently capture changes in the water column and make ocean monitoring more accessible and scalable.

  • Advisor(s): Reza Alam
  • Team: Nadia Allaf [ME], Philippine Blijdenstein [CEE], Daniel Carey [ME], Anirudh Iyer [ME], Josette Wynn [ME]