CUREE AUV is designed to autonomously conduct visual surveys of coral reefs, which can be repeated consistently to monitor changes over time. CUREE is one-man portable and easily deployed from small boats without the use of cranes. Once deployed, CUREE tightly follows the coral reef terrain from 1-2m altitude, capturing high-resolution imagery and soundscape that can be used for various types of analysis. Downward looking cameras are well suited to capture and quantify the benthos consisting of corals and other substrate types. Forward looking cameras are designed for observing marine fauna. CUREE can also capture underwater soundscapes using its hydrophone array during its surveys.
Surveys usually last around an hour and can capture a 20m x 20m region at a resolution of about 1mm/pixel. An optionally placed tag can mark the origin of the survey, enabling high-quality surveys without the use of expensive and logistically complicated acoustic localization systems. In addition to surveys, enabled by NVIDIA’s Orin NX computer and deep learning, CUREE can be used to visually lock on to arbitrary animals in the oceans and follow them around.
TRL: 7