CS&E’s Junaed Sattar Serves as Co-PI in IonE Impact Goal Grant

Department of Computer Science & Engineering’s associate professor Junaed Sattar is a co-Principal Investigator on the interdisciplinary team that earned a $200K grant from the The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment (IonE). The two-year project titled, “Technology & Education to Address Natural Resource Management Challenges: Phase 2”, will explore invasive species modeling using autonomous underwater robots.

This is the second round of funding for the project through IonE. The team is led by co-PIs assistant professor Amy Kinsley from the Department of Veterinary Population Medicine, professor Ingrid Schneider from the Department of Forest Resources, and Sattar. The first round of funding focused on water quality and utilized underwater robots to collect water quality data and transfer it back to scientists to do real-time monitoring of water quality parameters. In April 2024, the team conducted a demonstration for community partners interested in the technology at Lake Snelling with their robot, LoCO. Phase 2 of the project will focus on using similar methods to track invasive species.

“This grant is looking at invasive species modeling with underwater robots - both plants and animal species,” said Sattar. “We want to see how we can model their spread across different parts of a lake, region, and the state. We also want to see if we can deploy multiple robots in different lakes in a sustainable manner and deliver data back to one unified dashboard.”

Sattar’s team has developed a set of affordable, open-source underwater robots that can collect data in an interactive manner. These robots operate remotely and need to charge periodically. One of the current challenges is creating and deploying a docking station equipped with solar panels floating somewhere on the lake.

“It is similar to what a Roomba does, but it is much more complicated,” said Sattar. “A place in a house is much more structured and easy to find. There is no GPS underwater. Once the robot resurfaces, it also has to fight the waves and the current to get to its destination. Plus, electricity and water don’t really mix, so the hardware will need to be more advanced to handle this process. We have a prototype of this docking station called SeaCube. Our students are working to make it a wireless charging station like you see with smartphones, except meant for robots, and it would need to work in the water.”

While Sattar’s work focuses on the robotics side of the project, Kinsley will head up the ecosystem modeling for invasive species spread, and Schneider will tackle technology adoption within the community.

“This collaboration is very multifaceted and holistic in nature,” said Sattar. “From a robotics perspective, we are focused on advancing the technology, but for end-user acceptance, all of these different parts are necessary. What robotics capabilities get the end-users excited, and how can we make sure it is beneficial to their work? Ultimately, we want this to be adopted by real people, so working from their point of view is important, which in turn provides us with opportunities to create novel robotic behaviors. This collaboration really helps us see the big picture and informs the research in a very symbiotic way. That is something that I really appreciate about this project.”  

As this new technology advances, Sattar hopes that the robots can continue to learn and do these tasks efficiently by themselves. In the future, the end goal would be to have a working robot in every lake in Minnesota. Moving forward, the team also wants to increase the robot’s use cases and the types of data they can collect.

“The biggest question we want to address is whether these robots can learn and do these tasks by themselves,” said Sattar. “Can they figure out the best parts of the lake to sample so that our data is the most informative? How does the robot become more intelligent? We are still working to teach the robot exactly what we want it to do and hope it can continue to become more intelligent and helpful in these tasks.”

IonE supports dozens of high-impact projects that combine the expertise of UMN faculty, researchers, staff, and community partners – distributing more than $2.2 million in funding to 30 projects since launching the grants in 2019. This year, the Institute is excited to announce the awarding of another $1.9 million to 12 new projects, including Sattar’s. Learn more about the latest IonE projects at their website.