Solar-Powered AUVs To Monitor Hudson Pollution
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 13 of September , 2007 at 3:48 am
By Evan Ackerman
I think most people have some general idea of how polluted the Hudson River is… After all, 200 miles worth of the 315 mile long Hudson (from Hudson Falls to New York City) have been designated a Superfund site by the EPA due to PCB contamination. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes the Hudson an ideal testbed for an interconnected network of sensors to monitor the biology and chemistry of the river. The centerpiece of the system (in my opinion, anyway) are the autonomous, solar-powered AUVs that float along the river. They wirelessly relay measurements of temperature, pressure, salinity, dissolved oxygen content and pH back to a central base station, where the data are combined with readings from hundreds of other mobile and stationary sensors to help monitor the flow of pollution. The bots are being built by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the whole project is being coordinated by the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries. Their long term plan is to bring this concept to rivers in developing countries around the world.
VIA [ TreeHugger ]
Category: Eco-Friendly, Research
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Comment by Rod Munch
Made Thursday, 20 of September , 2007 at 7:45 pm
I went swimming in the Hudson a couple years ago. My testicles fell off.
Comment by Rick Komerska
Made Thursday, 20 of September , 2007 at 8:32 pm
Some corrections/clarifications to Evan’s text…
The original Solar-Powered AUV (SAUV) was conceived and developed as a joint venture between the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI) and the Institute for Marine Technical Problems (IMTP) in Russia. A prototype vehicle was built in the late 1990s in Russia, where it still resides today.
The second generation of the SAUV platform was developed in 2003 by a team led by AUSI and the current platform manufacturer Falmouth Scientific, Inc. (FSI) and Technology Systems, Inc. (TSI). The Naval Undersea Warfare Center - Newport, as well as RPI and the University of New Hampshire, are other groups that have been involved in research that use the SAUV platform. One of these projects was the Hudson River environmental monitoring described by Evan. Note that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is not involved in the development of the SAUV platform.