Welcome to the age of robotics and immersive, dynamic visualization! The Pavilion lake project has been a great opportunity to highlight the latest efforts and developments in underwater robotics and 4-dimensional visualization. Not sure what all of that means, well as they say a picture is worth a thousand words so have a look at this…
Still frame from a 4-dimensional visualization (3 spatial dimensions plus time) of Pavilion Lake.
What you are seeing here is a still frame from a 4-dimensional visualization (3 spatial dimensions plus time) of Pavilion lake. Essentially this a colorized view of the lake bathymetry if we drained out all of the water.
My role here is to help with the Gavia AUV operations together with Alex and Andrew and to provide some expertise in seafloor (or in this case) lakebed mapping and 4-dimensional visualization.
In the world of robotics a common mantra is that “any job worth doing is worth having a robot do for you…” If you think about it there are robots all around us from robots that make our cars to robots that vacuum clean our carpets to robots that go into battle and robots that explore the oceans and space. We are truly living in the age of robotics.
In addition to the age of robots we are living in an age of immersive visualizations. By this I mean the popularity of virtual worlds like Google Earth, Second Life and so many others. These systems like Fledermaus, which created the images above are more than just pretty pictures: these systems have a profound practical and scientific application. We are inherently evolved to conceive of things in four dimensions and our brains are powerful image processing biological systems. Having computer system that mimics and/or taps into the way our brains work makes the imagery and thus the data more powerful and meaningful to us. Having an immersive world at our disposal improves our situational awareness of our environment, something that is critical for human robotic interactions such as we are conducting in Pavilion Lake and like the ones that will be a central component of exploring the Moon, Mars and beyond.
-Art
This image shows 3 days worth of Gavia AUV mission tracklines. The colors are coded to the total depth such that blues are shallow water (~ 5 m) and orange-red are deep (40-50 m)
Here we see Alex Forrest and Andrew Hamilton planning a Gavia mapping mission from the back deck of the cottage. Moments later, they launched the AUV from the shore.
I've had an wonderful whirlwind experience here at my first time at Pavilion Lake and I'm looking forward to continuing to work on the data and hope to return again someday.
That’s my boy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!