In June 2015, we conducted an expedition to Hannibal Bank, a seamount and an ecological hotspot in the coastal eastern tropical Pacific Ocean off Panama, and explored the zonation, biodiversity, and the ecological processes that contribute to the seamount’s elevated biomass. We used SeaBED AUV and submarines to the exploration. The findings were recently published in PeerJ[1]. Jesus Pineda was the PI for this expedition.

Mission Data Visualization

Here are some visualizations of the image data collected by the AUV, on each of its dives. These were generated using spatiotemporal topic modeling technique called ROST[1:1], developed in WARPLab.

Photo Novella

References

  1. Y. Girdhar, W. Cho, M. Campbell, J. Pineda, E. Clarke, and H. Singh, “Anomaly Detection in Unstructured Environments using Bayesian Nonparametric Scene Modeling,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (accepted), 2016. ↩︎ ↩︎