Monitoring the Ocean Environment Using Robotic Systems: Advancements, Trends, and Challenges

Abstract

Abstract Scientists are able to gain a substantial understanding of various environmental processes (e.g., physical, chemical, or biological parameters) through environmental sensing and monitoring. Most of these monitoring scenarios involve large environmental space and require a considerable amount of work and time for collecting the required data. Realizing the associated human effort, the data collection process was automated, to some extent, by providing wireless communication capabilities to the sensors. However, with the sensing environments increasing demographically, the location of the sensors moved far apart, necessitating additional relay nodes. This made data collection time consuming and complex. In order to simplify the effort towards data collection by reducing the human involvement to a minimum and to reduce power requirement of the sensors for data transmission, thereby increasing their life, use of marine robotic systems has been experimented with successfully. This article aims to discuss the advancements, trends, and challenges of marine robotic systems for environmental monitoring.