The marine environment has deteriorated to an extent that it has begun to impact human health and the planet itself. The primary cause of this deterioration as identified are, an increasing population, the industrial revolution and the increased use of fossil fuels. While the damage done to the environment cannot be undone, the impact can be lessened by better understanding the ocean and monitoring future pollution using technology. Such an effort will help achieve sustainability as laid out by the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 of the United Nations. The article aims to provide an insight into one such technology, namely ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, being developed to understand and monitor the marine pollution. In doing so the article will discuss the emerging opportunities and risks associated with the use of AI in managing marine environmental pollution through sustainability. To strengthen the argument, use-cases of AI in the marine environment and their scalability are discussed.
Underwater surveillance technology was an advent of the Cold War. This technology saw numerous advancements only once the technology was declassified and pursued by academia. One such advancement in the maritime domain was the development of the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) that has the ability to enhance war-fighting capabilities while de-risking human life. Though this technology has since been commercialised, it has found limited takers in the Navy. The limited inroad it has made has been driven primarily by the developers and the governments that fund them. However, since this technology offers numerous benefits to the military it needs to be integrated into the Navy sooner than later. This essentially means that to achieve greater acceptance for naval use/ applications, integrating this technology into the Navy is essential. This in return requires numerous queries to be answered and facts understood to create greater confidence in the technology and its potential. Accordingly, some of these queries that can help address the knowledge gaps to facilitate future acceptance and induction of the UUV technology into the Navy are discussed. Though an attempt to provide comprehensive answers has been made, these answers are not considered complete but only a start point for a debate. As it stands, the technology exists; however, it is a lack of imagination that is disallowing its usage.
Scientists are able to gain a substantial understanding of various environmental processes (e.g., physical, chemical, or biological parameters) through environmental sensing and monitoring. Most of these monitoring scenarios involve large environmental space and require
a considerable amount of work and time for collecting the required data. Realizing the associated human effort, the data collection process was automated, to some extent, by providing wireless communication capabilities to the sensors. However, with the sensing environments increasing demographically,
the location of the sensors moved far apart, necessitating additional relay nodes. This made data collection time consuming and complex. In order to simplify the effort towards data collection by reducing the human involvement to a minimum and to reduce power requirement of the sensors for
data transmission, thereby increasing their life, use of marine robotic systems has been experimented with successfully. This article aims to discuss the advancements, trends, and challenges of marine robotic systems for environmental monitoring.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.