Junaed Sattar Leads $200K ENRTF Investigating Invasive Mystery Snails
Department of Computer Science & Engineering Associate Professor Junaed Sattar is the lead investigator on a project examining an invasive mystery snail species in Minnesota lakes. The $200K project is funded by the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (ENRTF) and is a collaboration with the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center (MAISRC) within the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS).
“This project focuses on a couple kinds of invasive snails in Minnesota that are bad for water quality, native species in the area, and recreationists,” Sattar said. “We are working to use robots equipped with cameras and sonar sensors to find these snails and map them. This helps us build an annotated underwater map of the lakes that notes the location of the infestations of the snails so that we can go and clean them up or manage them later on.”
Sattar’s primary research focus is on making robots work safely and intuitively with people, so humans and robots can coexist and collaborate. This means looking into improving a robot's perception about people, their intentions, and/or actions, engaging in dialog, as well as the environment. His past research has been heavily influenced by making robots work with humans in unstructured environments, particularly underwater, and current and work involve field robots in the air, water, and outdoor, all-terrain platforms.
“Robots usually work in a three-step cycle,” Sattar said. “The robot senses the world, then the robot plans and thinks on what it has sensed, and then it acts on it. The first step is the biggest hurdle because robotic sensing at this point is not very good in many cases. My work specifically looks at solving this problem in an underwater setting. Underwater, you cannot use wi-fi or radio signals over significant distances or GPS and visibility is drastically limited, but there are a number of environmental application areas where robots could be incredibly useful, so we are working through those challenges.”
Collaborators on this project include Assistant Professor Amy Kinsley from the Department of Veterinary Population Medicine, Professor Ingrid Schneider from the Department of Forest Resources, and Extension Professor Megan Weber, who works in AIS Detectors. Sattar, Kinsley, and Schneider previously worked together on an $200K grant from the UMN Institute on the Environment (IonE) that explored the impact of aquatic invasive plants and animal species. The current project expands on their previous work and has increased the robots’ use cases in Minnesota waterways.
Learn more about the project at the MAISRC website.