More than 70 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, yet scientists know more about space than about what happens in the ocean. One way scientists are trying to improve their understanding of the marine environment is through the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), programmable robotic vehicles that can independently study the ocean and its inhabitants.

But data collected by AUVs takes time to analyze and interpret, and scientists often lose the ability to use this critical information in real-time.

Mark Moline, director of the School of Marine Science and Policy in the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, recently co-authored a paper in Robotics on the advantage of linking multi-sensor systems aboard an AUV to enable the vehicle to synthesize sound data in real-time so that it can independently make decisions about what action to take next.

The idea occurred to Moline and Kelly Benoit-Bird, a colleague at Oregon State University who co-authored the paper, while they were conducting large-scale distribution studies of marine organisms in the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep ocean trench that separates the Andros and New Providence islands in the Bahamas. 

Funded through the Office of Naval Research, Moline and Benoit-Bird were investigating whether food sources such as fish, krill and squid play a role in attracting whales to the region. 

While there, the researchers decided to run a simple experiment to test whether a modular AUV used for deep sea research called a REMUS600 could be programmed to autonomously make decisions and trigger new missions based on biological information -- such as a certain size or concentration of squid -- in its environment. 

"We knew the vehicle had more capabilities than we previously had applied," said Moline, an early adopter of using robotics technologies in research and co-founder of UD's Robotic Discovery Laboratory.

To accomplish this task is more difficult than one might think. For one thing, the ocean is a dynamic environment that is always changing and moving. Similarly, marine organisms like squid are in constant motion, being pushed around by currents, migrating, swimming and changing their behavior. 

"What you see at any given instance is going to change a moment later," Moline said.