Design, Fabrication and control of a swarm of ocean drones
Reza Alam, Professor
Mechanical Engineering
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
Ships spend $45B/year extra fuel because of encountering ocean waves en route, which translates to 1% of the world’s total Green House Gas (GHG) emission. If waves that a ship will encounter can be predicted, then through a smart routing algorithm a significant (>20%) improvement in the performance can be achieved. This fuel-saving is equivalent of GHG emissions of 70M cars (more than 10 times the number of all electric cars on the planet today). Our idea is to realize this increase in efficiency through the use of a swarm of autonomous self-powered smart ocean sensors that can actively position themselves at selected points of time and space in order to measure waves’ height, frequency and direction which are required for our prediction and smart routing algorithm. New and advanced ocean prediction algorithms developed over past years by our team, together with modern sensor and communication technologies that just recently became available place us at a unique crossroad where we can accurately and cost-effectively address this challenge. Our technology not only makes a strong business case to the traditional shipping market as well as emerging markets such as offshore wind, ocean wave renewable energy and deep-sea mining, but also can have a considerable impact of global-scales on our climate.
If you are interested in this subject in general, and in this URAP project in particular, it is highly recommended that you take the course ME168 (Mechanics of Offshore Systems) which is offered this fall (fall 2023).
Role: Undergraduate students will be engaged in design, fabrication, conducting experiment and optimizing the design. They will participate in weekly meetings of the group and will be engaged in other activities in the area of fluid mechanics/Circuit design/controls/ and business/marking aspects of the work in our group.
Qualifications: We require a *minimum* time commitment of 12 hours a week.
At least one of the following is required:
1- Circuit design/Electronics
2- controls
3- Machine shop and fabrication experience.
4- Dynamics
5- Data Science/ Machine Learning
6- Interest in a startup environment and moving the engineering idea to the market.
7- taking ME168 (Mechanics of Offshore Systems)
Hours: 12 or more hours
Engineering, Design & Technologies