Our outreach community welcomed back the annual St. Pete Science Festival on February 17-18, 2023. After a four-year hiatus, the excitement of the in-person event was palpable.

COMIT hosted three different activities over two days. On the "School Preview Day," dozens of local students trekked to USF St. Petersburg's waterfront for a day of fun, hands-on science. NOAA's Office of Coast Survey generously donated an Augmented Reality Sandbox to COMIT which debuted during the school day. It was a huge hit and helped COMIT teach elementary and middle school students about how 3D features are drawn in 2D using contour maps.

The second day was the public-wide festival during which our participants used Legos® to build 3D models of Tampa Bay's topobathy data and took their own "soundings" to map 3D prints of a sea mount and sinkhole in our "ocean boxes".

Science Fest participants enjoying activities such as making their own map of a 3D printed feature (top, left), making a 3D model of the topobathy map of Tampa Bay (top, right) and learning about contour maps using an augmented reality sandbox (bottom).

Undergraduate intern, Jaden Crute, piloting TREVOR during its first deployment.

COMIT team members Dr. Kris Krasnosky, Chad Lembke, Matt Hommeyer, and Alex Silverman resurrected an Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV) over the last month. The USV was initially developed during previously funded projects within the USF College of Marine Science's Center for Ocean Technology. The coordination of its retrofit is being primarily led by Dr. Krasnosky with significant support by our undergraduate intern Jaden Crute from the USF College of Engineering.

The vehicle, dubbed TREVOR (Test Robotics Environment Vehicle for Ocean Research), had a successful maiden voyage on February 27th. This platform now provides COMIT researchers and students with ready-access to an uncrewed system (UxS) for a multitude of scenarios. It will also be used to develop software tools for UxS in the open-sourced Robot Engineering System (ROS) ecosystem.

The team is now fine tuning TREVOR to be more autonomous. Once that step is complete, the COMIT UxS team will begin integrating various sensor payloads and tasking TREVOR with mapping missions to evaluate hardware and software performance. Integration of swath mapping systems such as multibeam echosounders (MBES) will be an initial focus. Progress has already been made on one such MBES system -- with cooperation from one of COMIT’s industrial partners, R2Sonic, Dr. Krasnosky has written a ROS driver to interface with R2Sonic multibeam sonars, and the first release is now available on COMIT's new GitHub repository.

A common theme across all of COMIT’s UxS projects is to help shape a mode of operations where the use of these systems is easy, effective, and routine. The relaunch of TREVOR is a promising step towards achieving that goal.

A video clip of TREVOR maneuvering around Bayboro Harbor just outside of COMIT HQ.

Student Spotlight

Deep Soundings - Episode 2

The next episode in our podcast series was picked up by NPR's Here and Now (wbur). Still haven't listened to Episode 1? Enjoy it here!

Meetings and Presentations

Quick on the heels of the New Year, the Multibeam Sonar Training Course, MBC81, was held in St. Petersburg, FL during the first week of January. The course had new co-hosts this year: the Florida Institute of Oceanography, COMIT, and the USF College of Marine Science. Several of COMIT's own team members participated in the intensive 6-day course which we hope to co-host again in the future.

MBC81 attendees during lecture.

Later in January our Outreach Manager, Sarah Grasty, attended the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) Crowd-Source Bathymetry (CSB) Working Group Meeting in Boulder, CO. This was a crash course in all things CSB and has helped COMIT refine its own CSB project plans. Stay tuned for more!

A preview of a new section on COMIT's website dedicated to our 'CSB in the Bay' project.

Our team members have all been busy! Below is a list of additional presentations and meetings from the last quarter:

December

Dr. Rachel Gittman gave COMIT's final webinar of 2022, "Evaluating socio-ecological functions provided by novel, nature-based coastal protection approaches."

January

South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) Seminar (virtual), West Florida Coastal Ocean Response to Hurricane Ian, 1/13/2023 (Yonggang Liu)

NOAA Field Procedures Workshop, Norfolk, VA, 1/24-26/2023 (Steve Murawski & Stephan O'Brien)

February

SUNY Geneseo Physics Department Seminar (virtual recruitment), A Career in Physical Oceanography, 2/1/2023 (Jason Law) 

Decision Support Tools for Maritime Transportation in the Gulf of Mexico. Webinar presentation for the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS), 2/8/2023 (Mark Luther and Steve Myers)