📃 New Applied Ocean Research published by UCL and Loughborough University

We are excited to share our latest publication, a collaboration between UCL Mechanical Engineering and Loughborough University, published in Applied Ocean Research!

🔬 Title: Adaptive Informative Path Planning for Active Reconstruction of Spatio-Temporal Water Pollution Dispersion Using Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs)

A huge congratulations to Song Ma (马嵩), our PhD student at UCL Mechanical Engineering, who led this work! 🎉👏 His dedication and expertise have been instrumental in driving this research forward.

We also extend our sincere thanks to our brilliant collaborators Prof. Cunjia Liu and Dr. Christopher M. Harvey from Loughborough University, whose valuable contributions have been essential to this work!

🌍 Why It Matters: Pollution monitoring in marine environments is critical for ecological protection. Our research introduces an adaptive informative path planning (IPP) framework that enables USVs to autonomously track and reconstruct pollution dispersion—providing a powerful solution for monitoring oil spills, chemical leaks, and other environmental hazards.

⚙️ Key Innovations: ✅ Integration of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) with recursive Bayesian estimation for real-time pollution tracking ✅ Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based path planning for more efficient and accurate data collection ✅ Extensive evaluation in realistic scenarios, demonstrating significant improvements over conventional methods

This work was made possible with the support of UCL Mechanical Engineering and EPSRC

📖 Read the full paper here