SMaRC-team shares knowledge and encourages international collaboration at Breaking the Surface

SMaRC Doctoral Students Sriharsha Bhat and Christopher Iliffe Sprague presented a hands-on tutorial on system identification of underwater robots at Breaking the Surface at the end of September 2021. Breaking the surface is an International interdisciplinary field workshop on maritime robotics and applications, held in Croatia. This summer workshop encourages interaction and the exchange of knowledge and experience about the field.

The tutorial presented a machine-learning framework that can be useful for others within the field. The title of the talk was “System identification of AUVs with physics-informed learning, with an application in model predictive control”.

“After the tutorial, we will make the code publicly available so that other researchers can use the methods we present in their own work. We will use open-source libraries including JAX and CVXPY for learning and optimization”, explains Sriharsha.

Christopher fills in:
“In addition to showcasing innovation in the maritime domain, Breaking the surface is about sharing knowledge from other disciplines, such as machine learning, to enhance this innovation.”

Other SMaRC speakers were Ivan Stenius and John Folkesson. Ivan focused on opening up for collaboration and share of knowledge whilst giving an insight into the achievements at the Swedish Maritime Robotics Centre.

“We made many new acquaintances at Breaking the Surface, and we hope that the connections will be useful in the future”, Ivan says.

The subject of John´s talk was Data Driven Methods for Deriving Bathymetric Maps from Side-Scan Sonars. You can view the talk on our youtube channel.

The full SMaRC team consisted of Joana Filipa Gouveia Fonseca, Sriharsha Vishnu Bhat, Christopher Iliffe Sprague, Anna Arnwald, Josefine Severholt, Ivan Stenius and John Folkesson (picture).