3D Water Quality Mapping using Invariant Extended Kalman Filtering for Underwater Robot Localization

Water quality mapping for critical parameters such as temperature, salinity, and turbidity is crucial for assessing an aquaculture farm's health and yield capacity. Traditional approaches involve using boats or human divers, which are time-constrained and lack depth variability. This work presents an innovative approach to 3D water quality mapping in shallow water environments using a BlueROV2 equipped with GPS and a water quality sensor. This system allows for accurate location correction by resurfacing when errors occur. This study is being conducted at an oyster farm in the Chesapeake Bay, USA, providing a more comprehensive and precise water quality analysis in aquaculture settings.

ODYSSEE: Oyster Detection Yielded by Sensor Systems on Edge Electronics

Oysters are a keystone species in coastal ecosystems, offering significant economic, environmental, and cultural benefits. However, current monitoring systems are often destructive, typically involving dredging to physically collect and count oysters. A nondestructive alternative is manual identification from video footage collected by divers, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive with expert input. An alternative to human monitoring is the deployment of a system with trained object detection models that performs real-time, on edge oyster detection in the field. One such platform is the Aqua2 robot. Effective training of these models requires extensive high-quality data, which is difficult to obtain in marine settings. To address these complications, we introduce a novel method that leverages stable diffusion to generate high-quality synthetic data for the marine domain. We exploit diffusion models to create photorealistic marine imagery, using ControlNet inputs to ensure consistency with the segmentation ground-truth mask, the geometry of the scene, and the target domain of real underwater images for oysters. The resulting dataset is used to train a YOLOv10-based vision model, achieving a state-of-the-art 0.657 mAP@50 for oyster detection on the Aqua2 platform. The system we introduce not only improves oyster habitat monitoring, but also paves the way to autonomous surveillance for various tasks in marine contexts, improving aquaculture and conservation efforts.

Time-inversion of spatiotemporal beam dynamics using uncertainty-aware latent evolution reversal

Charged particle dynamics under the influence of electromagnetic fields is a challenging spatiotemporal problem. Many high performance physics-based simulators for predicting behavior in a charged particle beam are computationally expensive, limiting their utility for solving inverse problems online. The problem of estimating upstream six-dimensional phase space given downstream measurements of charged particles in an accelerator is an inverse problem of growing importance. This paper introduces a reverse Latent Evolution Model (rLEM) designed for temporal inversion of forward beam dynamics. In this two-step self-supervised deep learning framework, we utilize a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to project 6D phase space projections of a charged particle beam into a lower-dimensional latent distribution. Subsequently, we autoregressively learn the inverse temporal dynamics in the latent space using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The coupled CVAE-LSTM framework can predict 6D phase space projections across all upstream accelerating sections based on single or multiple downstream phase space measurements as inputs. The proposed model also captures the aleatoric uncertainty of the high-dimensional input data within the latent space. This uncertainty, which reflects potential uncertain measurements at a given module, is propagated through the LSTM to estimate uncertainty bounds for all upstream predictions, demonstrating the robustness of the LSTM against in-distribution variations in the input data.

A conditional latent autoregressive recurrent model for generation and forecasting of beam dynamics in particle accelerators

Particle accelerators are complex systems that focus, guide, and accelerate intense charged particle beams to high energy. Beam diagnostics present a challenging problem due to limited non-destructive measurements, computationally demanding simulations, and inherent uncertainties in the system. We propose a two-step unsupervised deep learning framework named as Conditional Latent Autoregressive Recurrent Model (CLARM) for learning the spatiotemporal dynamics of charged particles in accelerators. CLARM consists of a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) transforming six-dimensional phase space into a lower-dimensional latent distribution and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network capturing temporal dynamics in an autoregressive manner. The CLARM can generate projections at various accelerator modules by sampling and decoding the latent space representation. The model also forecasts future states (downstream locations) of charged particles from past states (upstream locations). The results demonstrate that the generative and forecasting ability of the proposed approach is promising when tested against a variety of evaluation metrics.