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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Deep-Sea Environments and Ecology
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1504099
This article is part of the Research Topic Environmental Impacts & Risks of Deep-Sea Mining: Recommendations for Exploitation Regulations View all 9 articles

Multi-AUV sediment plume estimation using Bayesian Optimization

Provisionally accepted
Tim Benedikt von See Tim Benedikt von See 1*Jens Greinert Jens Greinert 1Thomas Meurer Thomas Meurer 2
  • 1 GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Kiel, Germany
  • 2 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Sediment plumes created by dredging or mining activities have an impact on the ecosystem in a much larger area than the mining or dredging area itself. It is therefore important and sometimes mandatory to monitor the developing plume to quantify the impact on the ecosystem including its spatial-temporal evolution. To this end a Bayesian Optimization (BO) based approach is proposed for plume monitoring using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which are used as a sensor network. Their paths are updated based on the BO and additionally a split-path method and the traveling salesman problem are utilized to account for the distances the AUVs have to travel and to increase the efficiency. To address the time variance of the plume, a sliding-window approach is used in the BO and the dynamics of the plume are modeled by a drift and decay-rate of the suspended particulate matter (SPM) concentration measurements. Simulation results with SPM data from a simulation of a dredge experiment in the Pacific ocean show that the method is able to monitor the plume over space and time with good overall estimation error.

    Keywords: Plume estimation, plume tracking, AUV, sediment plume, dredge experiment, Bayesian optimization, Traveling salesman

    Received: 30 Sep 2024; Accepted: 05 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 von See, Greinert and Meurer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Tim Benedikt von See, GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Kiel, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.