Master students Øyvind Stokke, Jon Magnus Moen, Vilde Eirin Eidsæther Bruun, Kristoffer Fjellvikås Solvik, Ingunn Salvesen Haldorsen, and Thea Lefdal Kvalheim told festivalgoers about all the exciting opportunities for studies and research at IMT, and arranged quizzes for both children and adults.  

The students were present in order to recruit potential new students who is looking for a career within the field of Marin Technology, as well as inform the general public about what IMT is all about.  After watching the students in action, it was obvious that the IMT could not have asked for better ambassadors.       

Using multiple autonomous vehicles simultaneously, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers has returned to the United States after exploring the North Pacific Subtropical front - a sharp boundary where cold fresh waters from the north meet warm salty waters from the south.

Amongst the vehicles used were underwater robots developed by the Department of Marin Technology at NTNU.

The goal of the project was to demonstrate the use of distributed autonomous robotics to detect, track, and characterize these complex and dynamic processes with high accuracy across large spatial and temporal scales.

Professor Martin Ludvigsen at IMT hopes that this new way of mapping the oceans will help solve some of the big challenges that the oceans face.

– We hope that by using multiple cooperating autonomous vehicles, we can greatly increase our knowledge of the oceans, ultimately helping us to solve some of the issues that affects them, like climate change, pollution, and unsustainable fishing.

In less than three weeks, the underwater robots travelled over 1,000 nautical miles for approximately 500 hours, while the autonomous surface vehicles operated continuously, and the unmanned aerial vehicles performed over 25 flights totaling 10 hours.

The data that the expedition collected, and the experience gained, will also be of use in waters closer to Norway.

– The technical results for this expedition are also valuable for NTNU’s exploration of the upper water column in Norwegian and arctic waters. I think this clearly underlines the importance of this kind of collaboration between researchers, says Ludvigsen.