Robotics Student Helps Maritime Startup Map Unexplored Ocean Environments
Shalini Agrawal, MS, robotics, completed a co-op at maritime startup Orpheus Ocean, developing critical camera integration and navigation software to enable low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles to map unexplored deep-sea environments.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras. Main photo: Shalini Agrawal was a co-op at the maritime robotics startup Orpheus Ocean. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
This co-op helped an underwater robotics startup map the seafloor
Shalini Agrawal, a robotics student at Northeastern, developed software for an autonomous submersible to capture images and videos of the ocean floor.
While aboard Orpheus Ocean’s research vessel off the coast of Cape Cod, Northeastern University graduate student Shalini Agrawal entered commands on her laptop for an autonomous underwater vehicle to dive deep into the water below.
From there, the company’s flagship submersible the Orpheus AUV made its descent.
The second-year robotics student had spent months testing out the robot in a water tank near the company’s headquarters in New Bedford, improving both its camera systems and state estimation capabilities — its understanding of its position, orientation and velocity in the water.
So getting the opportunity to test out the software and hardware systems she developed for the autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, was a completely different experience, she said.
It was what Agrawal had hoped for when taking on the co-op.
Spun out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in 2024, Orpheus Ocean is a robotics startup that aims to disrupt underwater robotics by offering AUV services at more cost-effective prices compared to traditional deep-sea robotics companies.
Its flagship machine, the Orpheus AUV, was developed at WHOI. The submersible is capable of reaching ocean depths of up to 6,000 meters (3.7 miles) and is used for a range of applications, including material collection, high-resolution image taking, and deep-sea monitoring, according to the company.
Agrawal was inspired to do a co-op at the company because its work intersects with what she is learning in her master’s program at Northeastern University, including robotics sensing and navigation, mobile robotics, and autonomous field robotics, which involves designing robots to operate in unstructured and complex environments.
She was also, of course, interested in learning more about the emerging underwater robotics industry and its applications for deep-sea exploration, she said.
Shalini Agrawal, a masters student studying robotics, helped improve the capabilities of the Orpheus AUV while on co-op. Courtesy photo
“Underwater robotics is actually growing a lot right now,” she said. “We say that space is unexplored, but lots of the ocean is also unexplored. You don’t know what’s down there until you go there.”
During that week in April on the waters of Cape Cod at Kingman Yacht Center, Agrawal, along with her manager and a crew of others, tested the robot for an upcoming mission for a client who wanted to use the company’s low-cost and affordable submersible to take pictures of unexplored parts of the ocean off the coast of Hawaii.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News