The explosion of autonomy in oceanography right now is really exciting because it's going to give us the opportunity to access more of the ocean, more frequently than we ever have before.

We're on the edge of this robotic revolution right now and the ocean sciences actually employs a lot of robots.

Our mission is to develop and build the tools that the scientists need to take the measurements for the difficult Arctic environment.

Our idea is to develop these technologies, use the Arctic as a test bed, prove their value, and then transition them either to commercial industries or to sustained research organizations that will use them.

The whole purpose of all these tools, vehicles, and autonomy in robotic communications is for the data. And that data is gonna serve the scientists in a research capacity but also serve people more in a day-to-day mission.

Food security, the weather, climate measurements, all these things that we feel like these robotic devices will provide value.

My goal of the research is collecting observations that it will help us understanding the difference in energy exchange between water and atmosphere and between ice and atmosphere, and will help us understand the energy cycle in the Arctic and also using the data to evaluate the ice forecast skills.

Sea ice forecasting is important because many activities in the Arctic region depend on our knowledge of where sea ice is for commercial shipping, for safety of any kind of ship in the Arctic region.

And also people living in that area, some of them depend on sea ice for their daily activities so they would appreciate accurate sea ice predictions.

And the Arctic sea ice may be one factors that influence the formation and development of polar vortex. And on the global scale, we need to know the sea ice coverage in order to understand how Arctic will influence middle latitude weather and climate.

Sea ice environment is very dynamic. It's the edge of the frontier, it's always changing, so trying to take measurements near or under the sea ice is extremely challenging.

Our job is to make sure that these technologies are able to work in the Arctic region, when it's cold outside, when there's ice hanging around, when it's dark outside. Our job is to make them as rugged as we can.

We've developed a broad range of technologies. Some of the things are very big, say like the Saildrones. The drones capture over 50 different types of parameters, that's a lot of individual data.

I break them down into three categories. There's atmospheric data, meteorological data, there's also surface ocean data, the temperature and the salinity of the water and then we also have really complex sensors. Sensors like CO2 flux sensors that allow us to track the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean.

We also work with Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers, ADCPs for short. ADCPs help us measure the currents.

We also work with echo sounders. Echo sounders use acoustic energy to ping on things that are swimming around in the ocean.

We've also developed an underwater glider, profilers that harvest energy from buoys, a profiling float that can be tossed out of airplanes.

The vehicles and the sensors and systems that were developed will help further the research. And out of those research products will come peer reviewed decisions based on what's going on.
We lose more multi-year ice in the Arctic every year. We want to make sure that we're able to understand as much about this very rapidly changing system as we can. These technologies help us fill a really important void and that could have big implications, not just for local communities in the Arctic, but also around the world.