People
Student
Jordan Stanway
Sentry
Jordan Stanway is a graduate student in the Deep Submergence Laboratory. He will be working with the Sentry Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), collecting navigation data from the vehicle while it maps the seafloor.
Underwater vehicle navigation remains a difficult problem because signals from the Global Positioning System (GPS) do not penetrate the sea surface. Sentry must instead rely on information from an internal compass and a Doppler velocity log (DVL) for dead reckoning, and occasional updates from an acoustic tracking system to keep the errors bounded.
Jordan is working on sensor fusion techniques that promise to make the navigation estimate more robust and precise, especially when Sentry is too high for the DVL to see the seafloor. It is almost as important to know where Sentry is when it collects scientific data as it is to collect the data in the first place.
