This paper presents a review of Environmental Niche Modeling and a methodology for isolating the environmental niche of an aquatic species, given that prior information is available for characterising the physical tolerances for that species. To test and demonstrate our methodology, the environmental niche of the kelp bass has been isolated within Big Fisherman's Cove, Santa Catalina Island, CA, at specific confidence intervals. The motivation for this examination is to demonstrate the utility of ecological analys…

Aquatic robots, such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), play a major role in the study of ocean processes that require long-term sampling efforts and commonly perform navigation via dead-reckoning using an accelerometer, a magnetometer, a compass, an IMU and a depth sensor for feedback. However, these instruments are subjected to large drift, leading to unbounded uncertainty in location. Moreover, the spatio-temporal dynamics of the ocean environment, coupled with limited communication capabilities, make na…

The underactuated vehicles are apposite for the long-term deployment and data collection in spatiotemporally varying marine environments. However, these vehicles need to estimate their positions (states) with intrinsic sensing in their long-term trajectories. In previous studies, autonomous underwater vehicles have commonly used vision and range sensors for autonomous state estimation. Inspired by the intrinsic sensing and the persistent deployment, we investigate the localization problem (state estimation) for an…