Projects

DeepShark

Initiated collaboration between Stanford Student Robotics and Universidad de Costa Rica to automate analysis of drone imagery of sharks, rays, and turtles. Led a team of Stanford Students on a field mission to survey Santa Elena Bay, Costa Rica to survey endangered species (Pacific Nurse Sharks, Olive Ridley Turtles) and habitat (mangroves, reefs). We have since released several papers and are developing novel camera tags to study endangered marine animals from underwater (planned deployment summer 2025).

UAVs for Penguin Monitoring

Developed new methods for oordinating multi-robot aerial surveys for studying Adelie Penguins in Cape Crozier, Antarctica. GRIT (Greedy Repair Initializes Tabu search) outperforms path repair for nominal paths planned with both a traditional lawnmower-style planner and a more sophisticated integer program based planner, achieving adequate re-plans 10-50 times faster than two benchmark planners, making it ideal for online path repair in mid-flight. See the paper.

Characterizing Key White Shark Habitat

Worked with researchers at the Stanford Hopkins Marine Station to analyze novel white shark Pop-up Satellite Tag (PSAT) data tracking and performed in-situ sampling of oceanography in the region. Our results suggest that the core of anticyclonic eddies, peripheries of cyclonic eddies, and seamounts are structuring vibrant mesopelagic communities in the area, attracting white sharks in a similar way to the well-known White Shark Cafe.