Investigators: Susan Piacenza, Brian Taylor (UNC Chapel Hill), Joseph Piacenza (OSU), John Faller (CSU Fullerton), Cindy Harley (Metropolitan State University), Delaney O'Connell (UNC Chapel Hill)
This is an interdisciplinary project to create a computational behavioral model to study how various satellite tag attributes affect turtle migratory behavior and can be used to improve underwater autonomous systems. The underlying operation model is an agent-based model contains a synthetic magnetic field environment that is used for navigation cues, ocean currents, and foraging resource distributions. The results of this model display trade-offs between the agents' available energy capacity, total energy consumption, and ability to navigate to all goals. We found that in this model, migratory pathways become more sinuous with increasing satellite tag drag, as the agent has to increase foraging bouts to balance increased energetic demands. Future work includes further developing the ABM to evaluate changes in sea turtle migrations due to shifts in foraging habitat induced by climate change. Beyond sea turtles, the physical relationships built into the model ontology can be expanded to other domains within the marine environment, it could be modified to examine bioinspired design and operational trade-offs in remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). In addition, we are using geomagnetic navigation attributes of sea turtles to help develop underwater position redundancies for underwater vehicle GPS, in the event of a cyber-physical attack.
This is an interdisciplinary project to create a computational behavioral model to study how various satellite tag attributes affect turtle migratory behavior and can be used to improve underwater autonomous systems. The underlying operation model is an agent-based model contains a synthetic magnetic field environment that is used for navigation cues, ocean currents, and foraging resource distributions. The results of this model display trade-offs between the agents' available energy capacity, total energy consumption, and ability to navigate to all goals. We found that in this model, migratory pathways become more sinuous with increasing satellite tag drag, as the agent has to increase foraging bouts to balance increased energetic demands. Future work includes further developing the ABM to evaluate changes in sea turtle migrations due to shifts in foraging habitat induced by climate change. Beyond sea turtles, the physical relationships built into the model ontology can be expanded to other domains within the marine environment, it could be modified to examine bioinspired design and operational trade-offs in remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). In addition, we are using geomagnetic navigation attributes of sea turtles to help develop underwater position redundancies for underwater vehicle GPS, in the event of a cyber-physical attack.