Tracking Aquatic Invaders: Autonomous Robots for Monitoring Invasive Fish

Author

Tokekar, Pratap ; Branson, E. ; Vander Hook, Joshua ; Isler, Volkan

Author_Institution

Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Volume

20

Issue

3

fYear

2013

fDate

Sept. 2013

Firstpage

33

Lastpage

41

Abstract

Carp is a highly invasive bottom-feeding fish that pollutes and dominates lakes by releasing harmful nutrients. Recently, biologists started studying the behavior of carp by tagging the fish with radio emitters. The biologists search for and localize the radio-tagged fish manually using a global positioning system (GPS) and a directional antenna. We are developing a novel robotic sensor system in which human effort is replaced by autonomous robots capable of finding and tracking tagged carp. In this article, we report the current state of our system. We present a new coverage algorithm for finding tagged fish and active localization algorithms for precisely localizing them. In addition to theoretical analysis and simulation results, we report results from field experiments.

Keywords

Global Positioning System; autonomous underwater vehicles; computerised monitoring; directive antennas; mobile robots; path planning; wireless sensor networks; GPS; active localization algorithms; aquatic invader tracking; autonomous robots; carp behavior; coverage algorithm; directional antenna; global positioning system; invasive bottom-feeding fish; invasive fish monitoring; radio emitters; radio-tagged fish localization; robotic sensor system; Environmental factors; Fish; Mobile robots; Pollution; Radio communication; Receivers; Robot sensing systems; Tagging; Underwater vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1070-9932

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MRA.2012.2220506

Filename

6595693