Mapping the Ocean Floor

Project Summary

William Willis (Mechanical Engineering, Physics) and Qitong Gao (Masters Mechanical Engineering) spent ten weeks with the goal of mapping the ocean floor autonomously with high resolution and high efficiency. Their efforts were part of a team taking part in the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, and they made extensive use of simulation software built from Bellhop, an open-source program distributed by HLS Research.

Themes and Categories
Energy & Environment
Data+
Year
2017
Contact
Paul Bendich
Mathematics
bendich@math.duke.edu

Project Results: The team adapted Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) methodology to produce high-resolution images. They also built a Convolutional Neural Network that classified, with high accuracy, different features on the ocean floor.

Partially funded by the Duke Marine Lab

Click here for the Executive Summary

Faculty Leads:

Martin Brooke

Douglas Nowacek

Tyler Bletsch

Project Manager: Vaishakhi Mayya

 

  • "We made a lot of progress that would not have happened otherwise." — Martin Brooke, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering

Related People

Related Projects

Predictive Maintenance of F15s

The Air Force’s F-15E Strike Eagle jets have parts that wear down and break, causing unscheduled maintenance events that take away valuable time in the air for critical missions and training. Our team, Limitless Data, is working with Seymour Johnson Air Force Base to mine manually entered maintenance data to visualize and predict aircraft failures. We created a prototype data visualization product that will enable maintainers on the flight line and help them identify and repair critical failures before they happen, keeping jets ready to fly, fight and win.

 

Faculty Lead: Dr. Emma Rasiel

Client Lead: Lt. Devon Burger

Project Manger:  Vignesh Kumaresan

Neural Network-Based Self-Adjusting Computational Processors

This project aims to improve the computational efficiency of signal operations, e.g., sampling and multiplying signals. We design machine learning-based signal processing modules that use an adaptive sampling strategy and interpolation to generate a good approximation of the exact output. While ensuring a low error level, improvements in computational efficiency can be expected for digital signal processing systems using the implemented self-adjusting modules.

Project Leads: Yi Feng, Vahid Tarokh

 

Click here to view the project team's poster

 

Watch the team's final presentation (on Zoom) here:

 

Computational Approaches to the History of Cartography

Mapping History has focused on the categorizing, labelling, digitization, and 3D reconstruction of 16th & 17th century maps & atlases of London and Lisbon. Over the course of the summer, the Mapping History team has developed its own unique analytical dataset by painstakingly labelling every element contained within these maps, used python to digitize this dataset, and, now in the projects final stage, has begun the process of reconstructing these historical perspectives in a 3D game engine.

Project Lead: Philip Stern, Ed Triplett

Project Manager: Sam Horewood

 

View the team's final poster here

Watch the team's final presentation (on Zoom) below:

See all Research